Daughters of Israel Pleasant Valley Home

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent long-term care rating. We gave it an A in that area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a dominant short-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being this facility's third strongest category score. In that category, this facility received a grade of A. Our short-term care scores are presumably more meaningful for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on to the last category, this facility also excelled in the nursing category. We gave it an A- for this area. This wrapped up truly elite profile. The nursing rating is based on a handful of subcategories, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving patients at least once a day.