Sitter and Barfoot Veterans Care Center

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses commit to residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.124344 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Furthermore, this nursing home also earned impressive inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in that category, with a B. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.

The final category we assessed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B-. While this ended up being its weakest category rating, this is nevertheless nothing to be ashamed of. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for people in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.