Fireside House of Centralia

In addition to being a strong facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections recently. Its inspections are virtually flawless. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area usually have few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

To add to its elite assessments in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A- for its short-term care grade. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Compounding its strong profile, this facility also received a strong long-term care score, with a grade of A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the last area, this facility was awarded a very strong nursing score. Even though this wasn't nearly as impressive as several of its other scores, this is still one of our more favorable scores a facility can receive. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.