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 84.18604 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.

Another issue was the F this facility was given in the category of short-term care. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is generally a solid assessment of the 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. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last category we looked at is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category, which is a poor grade. In determining our nursing grades, we assess both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.