Oregon Veterans Home

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent nursing rating. We gave them an A in this area. The nursing grade consists of a handful of datapoints, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a patient more frequently.

This facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an B+ for that category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Additionally, this facility also received favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded it one of our stronger scores in that area, with a score of B. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 92.1519 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is somewhat below what we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. Even though this wound up being its poorest category grade, this is still not the end of the world. With our short-term care rating, we try to craft a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.