Arkansas Veterans Home at Fayetteville

With an address in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Arkansas Veterans Home at Fayetteville is one of five available nursing homes in this area. Featuring an overall grade of B+, this facility should work for most people. This ought to be on your short list in Fayetteville as we ranked it as one of the top three nursing homes in the city. The best part of this facility's impressive report card is its nursing rating. Nursing grades are discussed in the next section

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This facility offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 4.4 hours per resident per day. This is more nursing care than nearly any other facility provides. Lastly, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as good measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Adding to this facility's list of achievements, it also was awarded a high-end short-term care score. We gave them a dominant grade of A- in this area. In determining these short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection score. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of B+. Our inspection scores are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded an impressive long-term care score this year, with a grade of C. While this wasn't as elite as a few of its other category grades, this remains a decent rating in that area. Long-term care grades are used to gauge a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. This facility's vaccination data were not as impressive as its nursing hours. It administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 76.2987 percent of its patients. We would like to see some improvement herein this statistic next year. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.39 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.