Linda Valley Care Center

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an impressive grade of A. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 7.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We weighed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The final area we graded was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B+. This finished off a very strong report card. Only a select few facilities earned a B+ or better in in each area we assessed. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, 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.