Mervyn Sharp Bennion Central Utah Veterans Home

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. The nursing score analyzes several factors, however, the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a resident more frequently.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our third area, this nursing home was awarded first-rate short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this area. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The fourth area we looked at was long-term care, where this facility was awarded an A. This finished off a very impressive report card. Very few facilities earned an A- or better in every single category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.268295 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.