Fort Valley Health and Rehab

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

One of this nursing home's more respectable category scores was in the area of long-term care. This ended up being its second most respectable category. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Our long-term care grade is generally used to judge a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 98.19277 percent of its residents, which is better than most nursing homes. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with patients, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's worst area is short-term care, which is the final category we assessed. It received an abysmal F in this area. Despite several respectable grades in other areas, this score is nevertheless alarming so we wanted to make a note of it. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a score this poor in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this place was below average in two of the key staffing figures we looked at. In fact, it supplied far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.1 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.