Star Valley Care Center

In addition to receiving an elite overall grade, this nursing home earned an A+ inspection rating. This score is based on its recent inspection reports. An A+ in this area is one of the highest complements we can pay to a nursing home. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A+. Our nursing rating assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its strong assessment, this facility also was given a strong long-term care grade, with a grade of A. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home also performed admirably in the short-term care category. We awarded it a grade of A- in that area. This completed truly elite profile. Our short-term care grade is generally used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.