Pearl Valley Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center O

Located in Washington, Iowa, Pearl Valley Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center O is one of four nursing homes in this city. With an overall rating of F, we consider this to be a lower end facility. Based on our assessment, you would be better off to steer clear of this nursing home. Despite all this, one of the few highlights of this facility's report card is its impressive nursing score. You can scroll down to find out about nursing and other category grades

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B for our nursing rating. There are numerous criteria included in this grade. Most of these factors are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home Iowa in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this nursing home received just a D in this category. Unfortunately, this wound up being one of its best areas. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means the facility didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 75.30121 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be several points lower than what we expected. The last statistic we assessed is the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this place had 1.98 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is a higher hospitalization rate than most nursing homes, but it is not quite as bad as we expected.

This nursing home received a lowly F for its inspection rating. We would advise paying close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection grade. We would scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This facility was assessed 8 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also need to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines exceeding $50,000. This typically indicates that inspectors became fed up after several years of bad inspections.

The next category we rated is short-term care, in which this facility received a bottom of the barrel score in this area as well. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is obviously somewhat alarming. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Not surprisingly, we learned that this facility offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 31.5 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below average.