Avamere Transitional Care of Puget Sound

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating is largely based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning residents at least once a day.

This facility also was given an A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home received a very good inspection report this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a B. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

The last area we scored was this facility's worst category. Nevertheless, even its weakest link would actually be a highlight for most facilities. In fact, we awarded it a favorable grade of B for our long-term care category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.