Pearl Valley Rehabilitation and Nursing at Perry

Although we were down on this nursing home overall, we gave it a B+ for our nursing rating. This score is much more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Our nursing score assesses a handful of components, most of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 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 often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facilities second best area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is frequently a useful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The tricky part is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this nursing home was given a grade of just D in this area. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category may not provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other nursing homes offer. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 92 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

Moving on the last category of inspections, this ended up being this nursing home's weakest link. Inspection grades are based on a facility's recent inspections. We gave this nursing home a D in this category, which is not a very good grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. We would scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home had 2 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, we want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received significant government fines recently totaling more than $100,000. This generally signifies that a nursing home's bad track record spanned more than one year.