Cross Shores Care Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than its overall score. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. It actually performed better than most nursing homes in this category. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing rating. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of D. We weighed the levels of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home provided a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This facility fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we assessed was short-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this area, which is a very poor score. This is clearly a major disappointment. In crafting our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.