Residences at Vantage Point

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.

We also awarded this facility a score of A+ for its long-term care grade. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In our last area, this nursing home also was given an excellent short-term care rating, with an A. This completed an elite profile. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.