University Place

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A-. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B. In calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses spend with patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Additionally, we gave this nursing home a grade of B in our short-term care category. This is one of our more favorable grades. Our short-term care grades are important for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The final area we looked at was long-term care, which is this facility's weakest area. We gave it an F for this category, which is obviously concerning. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average percentage. Surprisingly, this nursing home also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.