Val Verde Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a decent facility is it received a favorable inspection score. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's next most favorable category was long-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this area. In determining our long-term care scores, we look at the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident at least once a day.

Our next category is short-term care, in which we gave this facility a grade of C in this area. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is generally a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. This figure was below average.