South Valley Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to point out the fact that this nursing home was given a first-rate grade of A- in our long-term care category. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 96.92307 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. The nursing score includes quite a few components, but the most important one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home was awarded a respectable short-term care score. Although this was not as elite as several of its other category grades, this is really not a terrible score. Our short-term care grades are probably most critical for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.