Panorama

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility Washington in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning residents more often.

Turning the page to our next category, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for its long-term care score. This is a dominant rating. For long-term care residents, the facility's 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 quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 93.53932 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we anticipated but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another impressive feature for this nursing home is its inspection rating. In that category, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of A-, wrapping up its straight A performance. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.