River Valley Health and Rehabilitation

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to this facility's list of achievements, it also was given a high-end long-term care grade. We awarded them a dominant grade of A in this area. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing rating features a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

The last category we graded is short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility an acceptable grade of B-. This was this facility's weakest category. Short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. It doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.