High Valley Lodge

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection ratings are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also was given a positive grade in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home an above average grade of B in this area. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared well in this subcategory. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient more frequently.

The final area we looked at was short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a C. Our short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.