Our Lady of the Valley

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. We looked at the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning patients even once per day.

This facility also was given a high-end short-term care grade. Indeed, this turned out to be this facility's second strongest category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This area is typically a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

The final area we rated was long-term care. We gave this facility one of our more favorable scores in this category, with a grade of B. Even though this wasn't as favorable as many of its other scores, it is still a positive score. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.