Fidalgo Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received a very impressive short-term care score. In fact, short-term care is its best category. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A-. Our nursing score is based on several datapoints, however, the most important one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning patients more often.

Turning to our inspection category, it appears this facility has earned respectable inspections in recent years as well. We gave it a grade of B- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The final area we analyzed is long-term care, in which this nursing home received a grade of C. Even though this ended up being its lowest category score, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. Long-term care grades are critical for individuals seeking personal care. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 98.07693 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.