Rehab at Shannondell

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Adding to its first-rate assessment, this nursing home also was awarded a dominant short-term care grade, with a grade of A. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most critical for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home also received an impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we scored was nursing. This facility was given a very good nursing score this year, with a B-. Although this isn't nearly as dominant as some of its other scores, this is nevertheless a respectable grade in this area. The nursing score is based on quite a few data points, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat discouraging figure which is well below average. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider some quality-focused statistics. We look at the percent of residents who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these data points are indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care can reduce these problems.