Solomon Valley Manor

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. In our short-term care score, we seek to forge a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It performed more favorably than most nursing homes in this category. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the elderly population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this nursing home also earned first-rate government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that area, with an impressive grade of B+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The final category we looked at is nursing, where this facility was given a B. This nursing home turned out to be strong across the board. There are quite a few subcategories within this category. Many of the data points relate to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these data points as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.