Shaw Mountain of Cascadia

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care score. Short-term care is its best category. In that category, we gave this facility an A-. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is generally a useful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections. We gave it a grade of A- for that area. Inspection grades are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Our nursing score is mostly tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

The final area we assessed was long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B-. This actually turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. This is nevertheless not a bad grade. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's 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 residents. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.