Pillar of Cedar Valley

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially focus on the severity of those deficiencies. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Remarkably, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C for our nursing rating, which isn't a bad grade. Our nursing score is largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below average. Finally, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility received a grade of just D in this area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to only 85.71429 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

Moving on to the next area, we gave this nursing home a D for the area of short-term care. This is the nursing home's weakest category rating. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With a grade in this range in this category, we were not stunned to discover this nursing home was well below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.