Idaho State Veterans Home - Lewiston

While we graded this nursing home very poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a B- in that area. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. According to CMS records, this nursing home averaged 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Keep in mind that when we calculate our nursing scores, we add more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of skill. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility also didn't grade out poorly in the category of short-term care. Indeed, we gave it a grade of B- for that area, which turned out to be among its more respectable grades. In the category of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. This nursing home elevated its grade in this category by offering more care from registered nurses to its residents than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 42.4 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.

We were also stunned to learn that this facility earned a decent long-term care score in our assessment. We gave it a B- in that area. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 95.505615 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable datapoint. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.51 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we assessed is inspections. This nursing home didn't receive favorable inspection reports in recent years. As a result, we had to give it an F in this category. For facilities with bad inspection grades, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. Tragically, this place had one category L deficiency. This type of deficiency indicates widespread threats to resident safety or health. A deficiency in this category is toxic to a facility's inspection grade. On top of having severe deficiencies, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.