Central Washington Hospital Transitional Care Unit

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our short-term care grades are likely more critical for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 7.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Unfortunately, it does not look like we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its remarkable assessment, this facility also was awarded an excellent long-term care score, with a grade of A. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided vaccination data. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we assessed is nursing, where this facility was given a grade of A. This finished off an elite report card. Only a select few facilities received an A- or better in each of our categories. The nursing grade is based on a handful of factors, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.