Selah Care and Rehabilitation

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility excelled in our short-term care category, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. We looked at the skill-level of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a resident more frequently.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

The final category we analyzed turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of C for long-term care. For patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 98.93617 percent of its patients, which is an above average statistic. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.