Washington Center

We also found that this nursing home excelled in long-term care. We gave them a grade of A+ in this area. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. The nursing rating considers a variety of subcategories. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents more often.

In the final category we looked at, this nursing home was awarded a very favorable grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home completed an elite profile. Short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.