Bothell Health Care

We want to point out that this nursing home earned a much better grade for short-term care than its overall score. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. In computing our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

An additional reason we rated this facility so highly is that it earned an A+ nursing score. This is simply as good as it gets in this area. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more frequently.

The final category we scored was long-term care, which was this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it an F for this area, which is obviously very disappointing. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.