Covenant Home

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Additionally, we gave this facility a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our better grades. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are kept in good health. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this nursing home was given a grade of just D in that area. Short-term care ratings are vital for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this place offers far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical nursing home. Lastly, we assessed the percentage 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 facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last area we graded was nursing, which ended up being this nursing home's least impressive area. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is certainly a major disappointment. We looked at the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this category. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. In addition to rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these data points. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this facility's nursing rating significantly.