Shenandoah Valley Health and Rehab

While we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's second best category is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The important question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home's next best category was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this area. This is essentially a middle of the pack score in this area. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's personal care instead of the highly skilled nursing or healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated only 80.34188 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we rated is nursing, where this facility was given a very poor score in this area as well. It received an F for this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. There are a host of data points included in this area. Most of these criteria relate to staffing levels. This place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.