Life Care Center of Kirkland

Life Care Center of Kirkland is a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, which has 74,745 people. With an A- overall grade, we ranked this nursing home in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the nation. We really can not say enough good things about this facility. If you look below, you can see this facility's category scores, which are also quite good.

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its short-term care rating. In the category of short-term care, we seek to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Washington in this area with 71.7 percent of its patients returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term 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 assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This place provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Approximately a quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are among the most skilled nurses. This is an impressive percentage of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours more in computing our nursing scores. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Contributing to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also received an excellent long-term care grade, with a score of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.6875 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Although it had 1.82 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was better than most nursing homes due to it having more complex patients.

In the final area we looked at, we found that this facility received a solid inspection report this year as well. It earned a decent grade in our inspection category with a grade of B. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.