Cherry Valley Healthcare

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this area. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area typically have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor dings aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of long-term care, where it was given a grade of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this area. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 99.726776 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. 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 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

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. Our nursing score features a number of subcategories. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient even once per day.

Moving on to our final area, this nursing home received an acceptable short-term care grade of B-. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. It does not appear that this facility provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.