Careage of Whidbey

While we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we gave it a B- for our nursing category. Our nursing score includes a number of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, our nursing ratings also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

This facility also didn't grade out terribly in the category of short-term care. Indeed, we gave it a B- for that category, which is among its more respectable scores. Our short-term care scores are likely most critical for those needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Another concern was the F this nursing home was given in the category of long-term care. When facilities receive this kind 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. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 90.90909 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best score 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 nursing homes with bad inspection ratings, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This facility was hit with 7 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.