Fountains at Mill Cove

One of the many reasons this place turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this very important category. Inspection scores are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other accomplishments is its superb long-term care score. It received one of our more favorable scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility received its next most favorable category grade in the area of short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of B- in this area, which is an acceptable grade. Short-term care grades are typically used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The last area we assessed was nursing. We gave this nursing home a decent score in this category, with a B-. Although this was not on par with a few of its other grades, it is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In computing our nursing grades, we weigh both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This place averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.