Clark Fork Valley Nursing Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its long-term care score. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 97.70115 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 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 frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we assessed is short-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our higher scores in this area, with a grade of B. Although this isn't as strong as a few of this facility's other scores, it is still a fine score. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on 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 nursing home's patients returned home.