Garden Terrace Healthcare Center of Federal Way

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility received an A+ for short-term care. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing score is mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more often.

Another area of strength for this nursing home is in the area of inspections. Inspections turned out to be one of its best categories. In that category, we gave this facility a B. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Turning to our final area, this nursing home received a respectable long-term care score. Even though this was not as elite as many of its other grades, this is truly not a terrible score. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's assistance with daily living rather than the skilled nursing and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate this place's vaccination data. Finally, this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.