Eastern Montana Veterans Home

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A. The nursing rating assesses several factors, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving patients even once per day.

Adding to this facility's list of achievements, it also received a high-end short-term care grade. We gave them a strong strong of A- in this area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is generally a reliable measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an impressive grade of B+ for that category, which is among our highest scores. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Moving on to the last category, we awarded this facility a grade of D in long-term care. This was the facility's least impressive category score. Naturally, this score hurt the facility's overall profile a bit. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.01961 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.