Cottesmore of Life Care

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this facility performed well in short-term care. We awarded it an impressive grade of A for that category. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is frequently a reliable measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. We awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our highest scores. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall score in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. Inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Places that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place 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 health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

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. Nursing grades are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient even once per day.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care. We gave this facility an acceptable score in this area, with a C. Although this isn't as dominant as many of its other grades, it is nevertheless not a poor grade. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.