Northpark Health and Rehabilitation of Cascadia

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong achievements in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for its long-term care grade. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. This facility clearly fared well enough in these measures to earn an impressive grade in this area.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. We analyzed the levels of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 2.7 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 place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility also performed admirably in our short-term care category. We gave it a grade of B+ in that area. This finalized a first-rate profile. Short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.