Bigfork Valley Communities

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this nursing home excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is generally a reliable measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our top scores. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. In calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of training of the nurses. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we scored was long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a B-. Although this proved to be its worst category score, this is still not a bad grade. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. This nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.