The Pearl at Kruse Way

This nursing home earned an elite short-term care score. In fact, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A- in this area, which really helped its overall grade. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Remarkably, this facility provides about 50% more hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we assessed. This is certainly a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the country with 64.1 percent of its patients returning home.

In addition, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an A-. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Our nursing score analyzes quite a few subcategories, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This place provided 7.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is among the better totals in Oregon. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more highly skilled levels of nurses. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home actually excelled in some of these. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents more often.

Moving on to the fourth category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D for the area of long-term care. This was the nursing home's worst category rating. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Facilities that don't fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.