Washington Healthcare Center

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes fared better in that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This place was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Our nursing score assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our higher scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most critical for patients needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next area we rated was long-term care. We gave it a C in that area. This is a fair grade in this category. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 95.333336 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.