Shoreland Hlth Care & Retireme

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection scores are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's short-term care rating turns out to be one of its better grades. The nursing home received a grade of C in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is generally a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. The facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best score was long-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively poorly. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 96.666664 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we looked at was nursing, in which this nursing home received a very poor score in this category also. It received an F for this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. Our nursing category includes a handful of factors, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Unfortunately, this facility also had abysmal scores in several of the quality-based measures to pair with its low nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than twice the national average in this statistic. This is concerning when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of earning a very poor nursing grade.