Cotton Point Living Center

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection scores are based on many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home was awarded its next best category grade in the area of long-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of C in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable grade. Long-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated just 65.753426 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this place excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its short-term care grade, which is well below average in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is generally a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final category we looked at is nursing, where this nursing home was given a poor grade in this area also. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. Nursing grades are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.