Vantage House

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home Maryland in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning patients more often.

This nursing home also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem 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 inspection reports are rare in this industry.

This nursing home also fared very well in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Not many facilities received a better grade in this area. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In the last area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our long-term care score. This completed a very strong report card. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.