Washington State Walla Walla Veterans Home

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this facility earned even higher grades in nursing. We gave it one of our highest grades in this category with an A. When computing a facility's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Among this nursing home's other strengths is its top-shelf short-term care grade. We gave them one of our most favorable scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Our short-term care grades are presumably more meaningful for residents in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also was awarded favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded it one of our stronger scores in that category, with a grade of B. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the datapoints we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.94323 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the final category we assessed, this nursing home earned a decent score in the area of inspections as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially focus on the severity of the deficiencies. This facility received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A few relatively minor dings aren't necessarily the end of the world.