The Hearthstone

The Hearthstone is located in the densely populated metropolitan area of Seattle, Washington which has a total of 837,792 people. This is a great nursing home. We gave this it an overall grade of B+, which is a strong rating. Based on our assessment, this facility ought to meet the needs of most people. This facility's strong report card was highlighted by its short-term care rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks in our short-term care rating as well. As a result, it received our highest score in that category with an A+. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. 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. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the nation in this area with 77.6 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This place boasts a really impressive 5.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day, of which a significant portion was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also performed well in several of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the number of its residents suffering falls leading to serious injury, this nursing home performed as well as any facility the state.

Furthermore, this facility also earned impressive inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a B. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home's least impressive area was long-term care, which is the last category we looked at. For this category, we gave this facility a grade of just D. We would like to to draw your attention to this possible weak spot, but you should not dwell on a single bad area either. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at nursing hours provided by this facility, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. Due to its grade in this category, we were surprised to find that this nursing home fared reasonably well in both statistics. Indeed, this nursing home vaccinated 98.181816 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is higher than many nursing homes. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.