East Cascade Retirement Community

Even though this nursing home's overall grade was rock bottom, it didn't perform as poorly in nursing. We awarded it a B- for this area. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

We were also pleasantly surprised to discover that this nursing home earned a solid short-term care grade this year. We awarded it a grade of B- in that category. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more critical for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home received a grade of just D in the area of inspections. One of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines of more than $100,000. This typically means that a facility's bad track record has been an issue for multiple years.

The final area we graded is long-term care. This facility was given a rock bottom grade of F in that area. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 84.90566 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be significantly less than the national average. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.