Columbia Lutheran Home

Columbia Lutheran Home is in Seattle, Washington. This city is among the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the nation with has 837,792 people. We awarded this facility a quality overall score of A-. In fact, we ranked it as the eighth best facility in Seattle according to our rankings. Seattle offers a slew of other nursing homes, but we doubt you will need to visit too many others. This one is a very fine option. The best part of this nursing home's strong report card is its short-term care rating. We discuss short-term care in the next section

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it earned an A+ short-term care grade. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is frequently a solid measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities with 64.7 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing grade weighs many datapoints, however, the main consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This place boasts a really impressive 4.8 hours of nursing care per patient per day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing impressive levels of nursing care, this facility was also above average in several of the major quality-based metrics we assessed in this category. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Adding yet another impressive category grade, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections category. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

The final area we graded was long-term care. We gave this nursing home a solid grade in this category, with a grade of C. While this isn't as favorable as some of its other grades, it is still not a major area of concern. In forming our long-term care grades, we look at the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. One of the data points we considered after this nursing home's impressive nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid negative health outcomes for the senior population. This combination proved to be effective as this facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.1 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a much better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.