Vermont Veterans' Home

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing score. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing score is based on a handful of subcategories, however, the primary consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also received an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This is based on the place's government inspections. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's government inspections. Places that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The third area we analyzed was long-term care. Adding to its top-shelf profile, this nursing home also performed well in that category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A for that category. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.595505 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we looked at is short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of A. This topped off a very favorable report card. Not many nursing homes received an A- or higher in in each area we assessed. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is considered to be a useful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.