Washington Care Center

Although this nursing home's overall grade was terrible, it didn't perform as badly in nursing. We gave it a B- for this category. Our nursing rating assesses many datapoints, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this nursing home received just a D in this area. Sadly, this ended up being one of its better features. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Given its poor grade in this area, we were not shocked to find that this place provides significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.3 percent of its patients returning home.

Among this facility's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection grade. More often than not, this means we found some red flags on the facility's inspection reports. For facilities with poor inspection ratings, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. Tragically, this nursing home had a category L deficiency. This type of deficiency indicates widespread threats to resident health or safety. A deficiency in this category is toxic to a facility's inspection rating. Another red flag is that CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

The next category we assessed was long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is a poor score. Facilities that do not score well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 92.07459 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.