Life Care Center of Kirkland: Missed Wound Violation - WA
The admission skin assessment is among the most basic safeguards a nursing home performs. When a new resident arrives, staff are expected to examine the body and document any existing wounds, pressure injuries, or skin breakdown. The finding creates a baseline. Without it, a wound can go unmonitored, untreated, and unnoticed for days.
That is what happened here.
The staff member identified in the inspection report only as Staff B told inspectors that they had no knowledge of the wound beyond the fact that it existed on the sacrum. Staff B confirmed the wound was missed and not identified on the admission skin assessment.
Inspectors classified the violation as causing actual harm. That classification, in federal inspection language, means the failure was not a paperwork lapse or a technical deficiency. Something happened to a resident as a result.
The sacrum, the triangular bone at the base of the spine, is one of the most vulnerable pressure points on the human body. Residents who spend significant time in bed or in a wheelchair are at elevated risk of developing pressure wounds there. When a wound already exists on admission and staff do not find it, no care plan is written for it, no measurements are taken, no monitoring schedule is set. The wound is, in effect, invisible to the care team.
The inspection was conducted on August 29, 2025, following a complaint. It was not a routine survey. Someone raised a concern, and inspectors came to investigate.
Life Care Center of Kirkland is located at 10101 Northeast 120th Street in Kirkland, a city on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The facility has been at the center of national attention before. In early 2020, it became one of the first nursing homes in the United States to experience a significant COVID-19 outbreak, drawing federal and state scrutiny and raising questions about infection control practices that reverberated across the country.
This inspection covers a single resident, identified in the report only as Resident 1. The report notes that few residents were affected. That narrow scope does not diminish what the record shows: a person arrived at the facility with a wound on their sacrum, and the staff responsible for examining and documenting that person's skin condition did not find it.
Staff B's statement to inspectors was direct. The wound was missed. The admission skin assessment did not capture it. The harm was real.
What the report does not say is how long the wound went undetected after admission, what condition it was in when it was eventually found, or what treatment Resident 1 required as a result. Those details are not in the inspection narrative. What is in the record is the admission failure and the staff member's acknowledgment of it.
The facility was cited under Washington Administrative Code 388-97-1060(3)(b), the state regulation governing skin assessment requirements for nursing home residents.
For Resident 1, the admission assessment was the first moment the facility had to understand what that person's body had already been through before they arrived. The wound on their sacrum was part of that story. Nobody wrote it down.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Life Care Center of Kirkland from 2025-08-29 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Download the official CMS inspection PDF from Medicare.gov
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 19, 2026 · Our methodology
LIFE CARE CENTER OF KIRKLAND in KIRKLAND, WA was cited for violations during a health inspection on August 29, 2025.
The admission skin assessment is among the most basic safeguards a nursing home performs.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.