Careage of Whidbey

While we were not very complementary of this facility's overall grade, it actually received an impressive grade of A- in the area of nursing. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

This facility's next highest category was short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B-. Short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We gave this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care rating. This is well below average in this category. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 87.5 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be several points lower than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. For places with bad inspection grades, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This particular nursing home was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this place was assessed large government fines recently totaling over $100,000. This usually indicates that a nursing home's poor track record has been an issue for several years.