Maine Veterans Home - Caribou

On top of being a great facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly perfect. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating is primarily based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

This nursing home also was dominant in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Not many nursing homes received a better grade in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is often a fair assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next area we scored was long-term care. We awarded this facility an acceptable score in that category, with a C. Although this wasn't as high as several of this facility's other grades, it is nevertheless not a poor grade. Long-term care ratings are essential for residents looking for non-healthcare services such as personal care. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 95.90164 percent of its patients. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.