Life Care Center of Port Townsend

This nursing home excelled in the area of short-term care, with an impressive grade of A in this area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is often a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 6.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

An additional strength of this nursing home is its very strong score in long-term care. We gave it one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a score of A-. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 80.76923 percent of its patients, which is a bit below what we anticipated. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. In calculating our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on the last category of inspections, this ended up being this nursing home's worst grade. Inspection ratings are based on a facility's recent government inspections. We gave this nursing home a score of D in this category, which is not a very good grade. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we typically take it seriously. One of the most significant factors in evaluating inspection reports is deficiencies. We suggest you pay close attention to the severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by the government inspectors had the potential to cause actual harm to residents. Lastly, we would like to point out that this facility received large government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home's bad performance has been an issue for several years.