North Valley Hospital

With an address in Tonasket, Washington, North Valley Hospital is the lone nursing home located in the area. With an overall grade of A-, this nursing home ended up being one of the 50 best facilities in Washington. In our view, this facility ought to be a no brainer for most people. This place's strong report card was highlighted by its nursing rating, which we will address in the next paragraph.

We also want to emphasize that this nursing home excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an A+ in this category. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we assess the number of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This facility provides an incredible 4.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Out of that total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. For example, it performed as well as any facility in the country in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Turning our third area, we awarded this nursing home a score of A- for our short-term care rating. This is a first-rate rating. In our short-term care score, we try to craft a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational 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. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The final area we looked at was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B-. This was this facility's weakest area. This is still not a bad grade. Long-term care scores are vital for prospective residents needing non-healthcare services such as personal care. In addition to offering favorable levels of nursing care, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This statistic is better than the average nursing home. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.