Lewiston of Cascadia

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing rating. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we gave this nursing home an A- for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our third area, this nursing home was given a strong long-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A- in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.54751 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we analyzed is this nursing home's poorest category. However, even its lowest point would likely be a highlight for most facilities. In fact, we gave it a favorable grade of B for our short-term care category. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is often a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.