Garden Terrace Healthcare Center of Federal Way

Garden Terrace Healthcare Center of Federal Way is one of four nursing homes in Federal Way, Washington. This nursing home was awarded an A- overall, which is an elite score. Based on our ratings, this facility is simply as good as it gets. Keep reading to find this facility's category scores, which are also impressive. It is hard to find any major flaws in this nursing home's profile.

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this facility also excelled at short-term care, where it received an A+. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. This facility excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is an excellent sign. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Washington in this area with 72.5 percent of its patients returning home. With most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing score is mostly based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 5.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. In addition to providing high levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the state in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We view these datapoints as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care offered.

This nursing home also earned first-rate government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our more favorable scores in that area, with an impressive grade of B+. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider 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 rare in this industry.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home was given a strong long-term care grade. While this wasn't as good as several of its other category grades, this remains one of the better scores we offer. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We weren't able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.