Weiser of Cascadia

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility fared well in our long-term care category. We gave it a grade of A for that category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category 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 statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with an B+. Few facilities with an overall grade in this range performed this well in multiple categories. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care grades this year. Indeed, we awarded them one of our stronger grades in that category, with a score of B+. Short-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on to our next category, this nursing home was awarded a strong nursing rating. In fact, we awarded it a B+ in this area, finishing off one of our better profiles. We scrutinized the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in determining our grade in this area. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.