Springs Valley Meadows

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was elite in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.17013 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning our next area, we gave this nursing home a score of A- for our short-term care rating. This is a first-rate score. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home 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. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next category we scored was nursing, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B. Believe it or not, this was this facility's weakest category. A facility could be doing a lot worse when it's lowest grade still outperforms most nursing homes. There are numerous criteria included in this area. Many of these criteria are tied to staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.