Shell Rock Senior Living

In addition to faring well in its overall grade, this nursing home received even higher grades in our short-term care category. In fact, it earned one of our best scores in that category with a score of A. Our short-term care scores are considered to be more critical for those requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Nursing ratings are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The last category we graded is long-term care, ended up being this nursing home's worst category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. This really was one of the few weak points on a quality profile. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.