Ballard Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. The nursing grade includes a variety of datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also gave this facility an impressive score in short-term care. This facility received a B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is more often than not a fair assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next highest category we gave this facility in any area came in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. In determining our long-term care grades, we scrutinize the personal care offered to a nursing home's patients. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit alarmed this facility provided the vaccine to only 88.92307 percent of its patients. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we looked at is inspections. Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive favorable inspections in recent years. As a result, we had to give it an F in this category. Since this data is compiled by independent government inspectors, we tend to heavily weight a poor performance in this category. This really dragged down this place's overall score. For nursing homes that received this bad of an inspection score, we would scrutinize the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular nursing home was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more severe categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by CMS had potential to cause actual harm to residents. Finally, we need to point out that this facility received large government fines recently of more than $100,000. This generally signifies that a nursing home's poor performance spanned several years.