Covenant Living at the Shores

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its short-term care grade. In our short-term care assessment, we attempt to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 Washington 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 employing a protocol of turning residents more often.

Turning to our inspection category, it appears this nursing home has earned respectable inspections in recent years as well. We gave it a B- in this category. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this nursing home was given an acceptable long-term care rating. Even though this is not as impressive as several of its other scores, this is really a middle of the pack score. Our long-term care grade focuses on a nursing home's assistance with daily living rather than the skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated just 81.333336 percent of its patients, which is well below average. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.