Browns Valley Health Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Inspection scores are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's inspections. Places that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our nursing grade includes many factors, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to the last area, this facility was given a strong short-term care rating. We gave it a B+ in that category, wrapping up one of our finer report cards. Short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.