River Valley Nursing Home

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality facility is that it earned a very impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In this category, we gave this facility an A. Our inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Among the reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a dominant long-term care score. In fact, long-term care turned out to be its second most favorable category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing grade includes quite a few datapoints, however, the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's worst category. We gave it an F in this area, which is obviously somewhat disappointing. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.6 percent of its residents returning home.