Wellspring Health & Rehabilitation of Cascadia

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave it an A-. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home received 11 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

Another one of this nursing home's better category grades was in the area of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B. It actually fared better than most facilities in this area. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is frequently a solid assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this metric. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident more frequently.

The final area we scored was long-term care. We gave this facility a grade of D in our long-term care category, making this its least impressive category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 81.28079 percent of its patients. This is several points below what we expected. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.