Garden Terrace Healthcare Center of Federal Way

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is frequently a fair assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing scores are largely tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving residents more frequently.

We also wanted to point out this nursing home's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. Inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

In the final category we rated, this nursing home was given a very strong grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a very strong profile. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were not able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.