Colfax Health and Rehabilitation: Staffing Failures - WA
Inspectors visiting Colfax Health and Rehabilitation of Cascadia documented the scene on September 10, 2025, first at 10:45 in the morning and again at noon. It was a small detail in a longer picture of a facility that had recently reopened a closed wing without enough staff to run it.
On the day inspectors visited, six of the facility's ten nursing assistant positions were filled by agency workers. The staffing coordinator, identified in the report as Staff B, said that was the new normal. At least three agency staff were coming in every single day.
Two of those agency workers had recently been sent home. One was found sleeping. The other was discovered in an empty resident room, not answering call lights.
The Director of Nursing told inspectors the expectation was that a call light be answered within 20 minutes. Residents on the 100 hallway, according to an agency nursing assistant who had worked about eight shifts there over the past month, were on their call lights constantly. The residents complained they had to wait.
That was when there were enough bodies on the floor at all.
The facility's stated goal was five nursing assistants for the 12-hour day shift. A medication technician named Staff C, who had worked at the facility for four years, told inspectors that five was rarely what actually showed up. Four was the more common number. When it was four, residents waited longer for help. Some did not get out of bed when they wanted to. The nursing assistants did not get their breaks.
Staff C also described what happened when nursing assistants called out: the medication technician got pulled to the floor to cover. That left two nurses to handle medications for the entire facility on their own, without the technician who was supposed to assist them.
That is exactly what happened on September 2. A registered nurse who had been working at the facility for three weeks, identified as Staff D, told inspectors she had been scheduled for training that day. Instead, she ended up on the floor because the medication technician had been pulled to cover nursing assistant duties. It was just her and one other nurse. Between the two of them, they had to pass medications, complete assessments, perform dressing changes, and administer intravenous antibiotics for 28 residents. The Director of Nursing stepped in to help. Staff D called it a big challenge.
She had been there three weeks.
The staffing coordinator explained the broader context. The facility had reopened a wing that had sat closed for years. When they brought it back online, they tried to staff up to five nursing assistants instead of four. It had not gone smoothly. Agency workers, who made up the majority of the floor staff, sometimes called off less than an hour before their shift started. At that point, the coordinator said, the spot was nearly impossible to fill.
The inspection was triggered by a complaint. It was conducted on September 4 and September 10, 2025, and cited under the tag governing sufficient staffing, referencing Washington state nursing home regulations.
No fines or enforcement actions were listed in the materials provided.
What the inspection captured was a facility stretched past its own standards, leaning on a rotating cast of temporary workers who did not always show up, did not always stay awake, and did not always answer when residents called. A nurse three weeks into her job, covering medications and IVs for 28 people because the staffing math had collapsed again. A resident, sometime before noon, still waiting in a room that smelled like the urinal no one had come to empty.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Colfax Health and Rehabilitation of Cascadia from 2025-09-11 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: Official federal inspection data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Editorial process: AI-synthesized regulatory data, reviewed for accuracy by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: June 29, 2026 · Our methodology
Colfax Health and Rehabilitation of Cascadia in COLFAX, WA was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 11, 2025.
Inspectors visiting Colfax Health and Rehabilitation of Cascadia documented the scene on September 10, 2025, first at 10:45 in the morning and again at noon.
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.