Carl M. Brashear Radcliff Veterans Center

On top of performing well overall, this nursing home earned nearly flawless government inspections. Consequently, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A+. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. In calculating our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also want to alert you to the fact that this facility was given a superb grade of A in our long-term care area. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.431816 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it an A- for this category. This wrapped up truly elite profile. Our short-term care grade is generally used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.