Valley Convalescent Hospital

Even though this facility's overall grade was terrible, it didn't perform as badly in nursing. In fact, we gave it a B- for this category. The nursing grade analyzes many subcategories, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below average. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents even once per day.

We were also surprised to find that this nursing home earned a reasonably solid short-term care grade this year. We awarded it a grade of C in that category. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for patients in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last item we assessed in this area is the number of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Sadly, this nursing home only earned a D for its long-term care grade, which is well below average in this category. Long-term care ratings in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to a relatively low 80.22388 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.

Turning the last category of inspections, this facility really did not fare well. It received an F in our inspection category. For facilities with bad inspection ratings, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This particular nursing home had 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they caused a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 15 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.