St Francis of Bellingham

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This place provides only 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a somewhat discouraging figure which is well below the national average. Finally, nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

This facility also didn't perform poorly in the area of short-term care. Indeed, we gave it a B- for that category, which ended up being another one of its better scores. Our short-term care scores are crucial for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The question is whether this also affected quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We wanted to note that this facility received an F for its inspection score. An F in this category is very concerning because it usually points to red flags on the facility's government inspections. When a nursing home has this poor of an inspection grade, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular nursing home was hit with multiple deficiencies in categories G through L, which rank among the more severe categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by the government inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. In addition to having severe deficiencies, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this facility didn't perform very well in this category either. With a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as as uninspiring as it gets. For long-term care residents, the 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 patients. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 98.9011 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.