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 0.3 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.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a score of B+. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is often a useful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Moving on to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections proved to be one of its best category grades. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of B+. Inspection ratings are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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 final area, we awarded this facility a D in our long-term care category. This was the facility's worst category score. Naturally, this category hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.15385 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.