The Terraces at Skyline

The Terraces at Skyline is located in the densely populated metropolitan area of Seattle, Washington. This is a quality facility, with an overall grade of B+. In fact, we found this nursing home to be better than most of the nursing homes in Seattle, which has a city grade of B. This facility's strong report card was highlighted by its short-term care grade, which you can find in the next paragraph.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is typically a fair measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. This facility is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. It supplied roughly 50% more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in this area with 64.7 percent of its residents returning home.

In addition, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area usually have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home earned high marks for nursing. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Our nursing grade is based on several datapoints, however, the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides an incredible 5.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls leading to serious injury, this place performed as well as any facility Washington.

Turning to the next area, this facility really didn't fare very well. Due to a poor grade of F in that category, this is clearly its poorest area. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. With a long-term care grade in this range, we were surprised to find that this facility had favorable subcategory scores in both nursing hours and its vaccination records. Indeed, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This percentage is actually higher than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.34 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.