Potomac Valley Nursing & Wellness

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that category with a grade of A-. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. It actually fared better than most facilities in this area. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 93.485916 percent of its residents. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received a strong score in our short-term care category. We awarded this nursing home a better than average grade of B in that category. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next area we graded is nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. Of course, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Our nursing score includes a handful of factors, but the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing score significantly.