River Valley Care Center

This facility received favorable marks in long-term care this year. We gave them a solid grade in that area, with a B+. This ended up being the facility's best grade and helped its profile quite a bit. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We would also like to point out this nursing home's strong inspection grade. This nursing home earned a grade of B in this category, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we had a generally favorable view of this nursing home's inspections.

This nursing home's third best category was short-term care. We awarded it a B- in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack score in this category. With our short-term care grade, we strive to forge a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed is nursing, which turned out to be a low point for this nursing home. We gave this nursing home a D in the area of nursing. In calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This place offered just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is well below average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.