Michael J Fitzmaurice South Dakota Veterans Home

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. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. We weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many dominant grades, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this category. Short-term care ratings are critical for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care score as well. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that category with a grade of B+. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 97.835495 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final area, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for our nursing rating. This finished off a very strong report card. Our nursing score looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.