Otterbein Portage Valley

One of the reasons this proved to be a quality facility is it received a very impressive short-term care score. Short-term care turned out to be its best category. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. We awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best grades. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range which received multiple category grades this high. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home received high marks for nursing. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with an impressive grade of A-. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Ohio in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning residents more often.

Moving on to our next area, we gave this nursing home a D in our long-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category score. However, we wouldn't dwell on a single weak category. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 98.290596 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, 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. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.