South Valley Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A for inspections. Inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on our next category, we awarded this nursing home a score of A- for our long-term care rating. This is a superb score. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.462364 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we looked at was short-term care. In this category, we gave this facility an acceptable grade of B-. This actually was this nursing home's worst area. Our short-term care grades are critical for individuals seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.