Swanton Valley Center

While we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B+ for our inspections category. This is the result of the facility receiving a decent inspection report this year. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Sadly, this facility only received a grade of D for its short-term care score, which was actually one of its better category grades. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most important for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we discovered that this place provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical nursing home. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

This facility wound up receiving a a terrible score in our long-term care category. It was given a lowly F in this category. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. We were a bit worried that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 18.852459 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The final category we scored is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This place offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.