The Green House Community at Vernon Homes

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded an impressive long-term care score. As a matter of fact, we gave it a grade of B+ in that area, which is one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 97.59615 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the nursing home population. 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. Our nursing score assesses quite a few datapoints, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, while this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of our quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this subcategory.

The next category we rated is short-term care, turned out to be this nursing home's worst category. We gave this facility a D in that category. This was one of the couple of weak links in an otherwise impressive profile. Short-term care grades are generally used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.