High Valley Lodge

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless 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. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B. It actually outpaced most facilities 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 healthcare services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 95.783134 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home 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.

This nursing home also received a strong grade in our nursing category. We awarded this nursing home an above average grade of B in this area. Our nursing grade weighs many subcategories, however, the most important one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care, which was this facility's weakest area. We awarded this facility a D in that category. Sadly, this grade hurt the facility's overall grade to some degree. Our short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. It looks like this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the data we considered. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.