Central Washington Hospital Transitional Care Unit

One of the many reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. This is as good as it gets in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 7.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning the page to our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care grade. This is a dominant grade. For patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. It does not look like this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to our next area, this facility also performed admirably in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. This topped off a straight A report card. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning patients at least once a day.