Shaw Mountain of Cascadia

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home performed well in short-term care. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our best grades. In calculating our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is generally an excellent sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in this area with 61.2 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 4.7 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This was one of the better totals we found. Furthermore, we found that a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of care, this place also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With under five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers can be prevented by providing better nursing care and having a system of moving patients more often.

We also wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them a grade of B+ in this category. Our inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category usually have few severe deficiencies. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

The last area we rated is long-term care. We gave this facility a solid score in this category, with a grade of C. Although this isn't on par with many of this nursing home's other scores, it is still not a bad grade. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home'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 patients. After assessing the very respectable amount of nursing hours provided by this nursing home, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 96.694214 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.86 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.