Covenant Living at the Shores

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. In crafting these short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 7.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections rating. There are a host of factors within this grade. Most of the criteria are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning residents even once per day.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our higher scores in our long-term care category as well, with a B+. For prospective residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 82.35294 percent of its patients. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its other impressive category grades, we gave this facility a score of B+ for its inspection score. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area tend to have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some 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 that 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.