Vicar's Landing Nursing Home

To pair with a favorable overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for inspections. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to direct your attention to the fact that this nursing home excelled in our short-term care category. We awarded them an exemplary grade of A+ in this category. Our short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Moving on our third category, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf long-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A in that area. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to our fourth area, this facility also excelled in the nursing category. We awarded it an A- in this area. This completed a straight A profile. There are a host of data points within this category. Many of these subcategories reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.