Coastal View Healthcare Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. Short-term care scores are crucial for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it an A- for that area. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. We weighed the skill-level of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients even once per day.

Moving on to the next category, we awarded this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category. This was the nursing home's worst category score. Of course, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall profile a bit. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.