Washington Nursing Center

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its inspection grade. This is far better than its overall score. Our inspection scores weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home received 15 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

In addition, we gave this facility a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable scores. For residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 78.51852 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we were hoping for. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home ended up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our short-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this area. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last category we analyzed is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is clearly a major concern. The nursing score assesses several subcategories, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.