Avamere Transitional Care of Puget Sound

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Contributing to its strong assessment, this nursing home also was awarded a superb short-term care grade, with a grade of A. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is often a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Furthermore, this nursing home also earned impressive inspections in recent years. We awarded them 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. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The next area we rated was long-term care, in which this facility was given a B. While this ended up being its least impressive category grade, this is nevertheless an above average grade. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.