Pearl Valley Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center O

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Nursing ratings are mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a B in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our better grades. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home did not receive a favorable inspection grade. We gave it a grade of just D in this area. One of the more significant factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility had 8 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a risk to patient safety or health. Lastly, we want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received large government fines recently of over $100,000. This usually signifies that a facility's bad track record spanned multiple years.

The last category we rated was long-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the nursing home did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home administered the vaccine to a relatively low 77.91411 percent of its patients, which is several points lower than we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.