Shaw Mountain of Cascadia

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. We awarded it an A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing grade is largely associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also received top notch inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The last category we analyzed is long-term care, in which this facility was given a C. This proved to be this facility's weakest category. This is still not a major area of concern. 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. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 97.87234 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.