North Dakota Veterans Home

With an address in Lisbon, North Dakota, North Dakota Veterans Home is one of just a few facilities in this city. Featuring an overall grade of A-, this facility is among the higher-rated facilities we assessed. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top quarter of all facilities in the United States. This facility's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection reports, which you can find in the next section.

To go along with its favorable overall score, we awarded this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. It doesn't appear that we have deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing grade is largely associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility boasts an impressive 4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which more than an hour of these hours were provided by registered nurses. This is among the most highly trained levels of nurses. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Turning our third area, this facility was awarded a top-shelf long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in that category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we assessed was short-term care, in which this nursing home received a B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's lowest grade still beats out most other facilities. In calculating these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 18.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.