FORT MYERS, Fla. (December 19, 2008) — Shell Point Retirement Community was the only Lee County nursing facility to earn 5 Stars recently from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This recognition places the Shell Point Pavilion in the top 10% of the best nursing facilities in the state of Florida. Shell Point is one of only four nursing facilities within 100 miles to have received the 5-Star recognition from the CMS.
“Whether we are welcoming people from outside Shell Point or our own residents from within our community, it is our philosophy to operate as if we are going to be inspected every day. Consistency is the key to our success,” said Peter Dys, President of Shell Point Retirement Community. “The Larsen Pavilion has always provided our residents with peace of mind, that if they need to stay there – whether it is for a week or two to recover from surgery, or for a long term stay – they know the quality of care offered is the best available.”
The CMS agency is a Federal agency that is responsible for overseeing Medicare skilled nursing facilities, and this is the first time that this agency has offered such a rating system. The “five-star” system provides a nursing home quality of care rating of 1 to 5 stars derived from three criteria. The rating includes health survey inspections, quality measures, and nurse staffing information from the most recent health survey inspection. The five-star rating system gives a full sense of quality and the ability to discern key strengths and weaknesses. According to the CMS website, CMS assists beneficiaries and their families in making informed nursing home choices by providing information on individual measures of quality of care, staffing, and survey inspection information. The goal of the “five-star” composite score is to take information currently available to the public and create a mechanism to make this data more user-friendly and to provide a meaningful distinction between high performing and low performing homes.
“We are obviously very pleased with this recent recognition,” said Sherry Brown, RN, Director of Long Term Care and Nursing Home Administrator at Shell Point. “Our real satisfaction comes from knowing that we provide quality care to our residents.”
Shell Point Retirement Community is a not-for-profit continuing care retirement community, providing lifecare services to more than 2,100 residents. Services include 1,204 independent residences, 219 skilled nursing beds, and 252 assisted living beds in the largest continuing care retirement community in the state of Florida and one of the largest in the nation. Shell Point has been nationally accredited since 1993 and is a recognized leader in the retirement industry. The community is located in Fort Myers just off Summerlin Road, two miles before the Sanibel causeway.
