Delaware Veterans Home

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing category weighs quite a few datapoints, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Only a select group of nursing homes performed more favorably in this category. In crafting these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility earned a very good inspection report this year as well. For this reason, it earned one of our higher grades in that category with a B. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home's worst area is long-term care, which is the last area we looked at. For this category, we gave this nursing home an D. We want to to draw your attention to this potential weak link, but you shouldn't dwell on one bad category either. For patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.5 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.