Powell Valley Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

Turning the page to our third area, this facility was awarded a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a score of A- in this area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services To have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The fourth category we assessed is long-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of A-. This finished off a very strong report card. Only a select few facilities received an A- or better in every category. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.190475 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.