Columbia Crest Center

We would like to point out that this facility's short-term care score outpaced its overall score. This facility received a B+ in this category, which is a very solid score. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in our nursing category, where it received a grade of B. When calculating our nursing ratings, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Washington 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 by employing a policy of turning residents even once per day.

This facility's inspection grade also was quite a bit better than its overall grade. Due to a strong inspection report this year, it earned one of our better scores in that category with a B. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's worst category was long-term care, which is the final area we analyzed. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of D. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.