Vermont Veterans' Home

In addition to receiving a great overall rating, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it an A for that area, which is one of our best grades. Our inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report 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.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a score of B+. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.12332 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B+. It performed more favorably than most facilities in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next area we assessed is nursing. We gave this facility one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of B. This nursing home ended up being very solid in each category we looked at. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as good indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.