Hemet Valley Healthcare Center

We want to point out that this facility really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in this area with an A-. Our inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of B-. We assessed the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in computing our score in this category. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The third area we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home received a B- in this area. Our short-term care scores are considered to be more critical for individuals requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The last area we scored was long-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is certainly a major disappointment. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the data points we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.