The Dalles Health and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled at short-term care, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. In determining these short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we gave this facility an A- for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weighed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the final category we assessed, this facility was given an impressive grade grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this score, the nursing home rounded out a straight A profile. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.