Washington Center

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in this category with an A. Inspection grades are based on datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

One of this nursing home's more respectable category grades was in the category of long-term care. This wound up being its second best category. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.08467 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we graded is short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a decent grade of B-. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is considered to be a solid measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

The final category we rated is nursing, which is this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this facility a D in that category. Of course, this category pulled down the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. Our nursing score looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This place averaged just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.