Maine Veterans Home - Augusta

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a resident more often.

We also would like to point out the fact that this nursing home was given a first-rate score of A in our long-term care area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.17073 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to our final area, this nursing home also performed admirably in our short-term care category. We gave it an A for this area. This topped off truly elite profile. In determining these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.