Valley Convalescent Hospital

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B for our nursing rating. In determining our nursing scores, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents more often.

We were also stunned to discover that this nursing home received a reasonably solid short-term care rating in our assessment. We gave it a B- in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is generally a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home's second lowest category is long-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a relatively poor grade. Nursing homes that don't score well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We found that this facility vaccinated just 67.55725 percent of its patients, which is not a very encouraging sign. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

Moving on our last category of inspections, this nursing home received a horrible grade. When a nursing home has this poor of an inspection grade, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 18 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.