Bear Valley Community Healthcare District Skilled Nursing Facility

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its best category. In that category, we awarded this facility an A. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our rating in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its inspections. We gave it a grade of A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's government inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home received a category L deficiency, which was unexpected given its inspection rating. This category of deficiency means inspectors uncovered a widespread deficiency putting patient safety or health in immediate jeopardy. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

Turning the page to our third area, this facility received a favorable short-term care score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last category we analyzed was long-term care, which proved to be a weak link for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a D for our long-term care category, rendering this the facility's least impressive grade. We would nevertheless suggest that you consider all of a nursing home's grades. For residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.