Josephine Caring Community

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. With our short-term care rating, we endeavor to forge a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. This nursing home elevated its grade in this category by offering more care from registered nurses to its residents than the average facility. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. This place performed as well as just about any facility in Washington in this area with 59.6 percent of its residents returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provided 4.2 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This was one of the better totals we found. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. In addition to offering impressive levels of care, this facility was also above average in several of the major quality measures we looked at in this category. For example, it performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. These are generally good measures of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.

Adding to its impressive category grades, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and 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 health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, where this facility received a B-. This proved to be this nursing home's least impressive category. This is still a middle of the pack score. With our long-term care category, we weigh the sheer quantity of services offered by a nursing home, along with some quality statistics. In addition to providing above average levels of nursing care, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 99.49875 percent of its residents. This statistic is higher than most nursing homes. This combination proved to be effective as this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.33 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.