Transitional Care Center of Seattle

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent nursing rating. We awarded them a grade of A in this category. There are several criteria included in this area. Many of these criteria relate to staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining 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 many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

This facility also excelled in inspections. We gave it an A- for that area, which is one of our highest scores. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall score in this range which received multiple category grades this high. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. We were not able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. We would like to have more data for this nursing home. Without having deficiency related data, it is a challenge to fully grade the place in the inspections category.

This facility's next most favorable area turned out to be short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B-. Short-term care grades are generally employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 2.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last category we looked at is long-term care, which is this facility's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 93.05556 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.