Bothell Health Care

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this facility a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far better than its overall grade. Our inspection ratings are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility also excelled in the area of short-term care. For this reason, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which happens to be one of our highest grades. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home. This place was above average in this metric with 53.4 percent of its residents able to return home.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. When computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provided 4.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This was well above average. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both impressive figures. Finally, we also factored some quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility didn't perform very well. With a poor grade of F in long-term care, this was this nursing home's poorest category grade. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.47369 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.42 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.