South Valley Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. We scrutinized the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this area. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This place fared well in some of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided with better nursing care.

Turning the page to our third category, we gave this facility a score of A- for its long-term care score. This is a very impressive score. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. One of the datapoints we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 96.75676 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we graded is short-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our better grades in this area, with a B. Although this was not as dominant as some of its other grades, it is still a positive grade. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. The last item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.