Mirabella Seattle

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this facility an A+ for its short-term care grade. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is considered to be a useful measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they 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 to the community. We discovered that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS 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.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving patients at least once a day.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home received a strong long-term care grade. We awarded it an A- in that category, giving this facility straight A's. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.