Lea Hill Rehabilitation and Care Center

Lea Hill Rehabilitation and Care Center is a small non-profit nursing home located in Auburn, Washington. We awarded this nursing home an overall grade of B+. A grade of this caliber requires favorable scores in most areas. Based on the data we reviewed, you could do much worse than this place. This facility was better in some categories than others, but it did not have any poor grades in any of the major areas discussed below. More information about these categories can be found below.

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A-. Few facilities fared better in this area. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides an impressive 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Out of this total, nearly one fourth of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most highly trained levels of nurses. Lastly, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls. Many pressure ulcers can be avoided by offering better nursing care and a policy of moving residents more frequently.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our highest scores. This is one of the few facilities with an overall score in this range which received multiple category grades this high. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Moving on our third category, this nursing home was awarded a favorable short-term care score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a A-. Short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that it fared better than most facilities in this area with 54.5 percent of its residents returning home.

The last area we graded ended up being this nursing home's poorest area. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still gave it a respectable grade of B- in long-term care. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the above average volume of nursing care provided by this nursing home, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which appears to be higher than many nursing homes. This combination proved to be successful as this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Although it had 1.73 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most facilities due to it having more complex patients.