Pearl Valley Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center

To go along with its decent overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our nursing rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall score. When calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place 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.

We also awarded this facility a middle of the pack grade in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care rating. This is not an impressive grade. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 94.25288 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Moving on the last category of government inspections, we gave this facility a score of D for our inspection category. This proved to be this facility's worst grade. We take a poor grade in this category very seriously. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. We would scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with 7 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, we would like to point out that this nursing home received large government fines recently of more than $100,000. This often suggests that a bad performance has been an issue for more than one year.