Columbia Lutheran Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

Adding to its fine profile, this facility also was awarded an excellent short-term care score, with a score of A. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also would like to note the fact that this nursing home was awarded a first-rate score of A- in our long-term care area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.557526 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Finishing off its excellent profile, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspections. In fact, we gave it a B+ for that category, which is one of our higher scores. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area usually have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.