Pillar of Cedar Valley

Although we didn't grade this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent score in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid nursing homes that had a long list of severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We also awarded this facility a grade of B- for our nursing rating. We analyzed the licensure of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

This nursing home's second worse score is long-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means the nursing home didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. After considering the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 91.729324 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The next category we assessed was short-term care. This facility was given a very poor grade of F in that area. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Given its grade in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.