Valley Falls Terrace

In addition to receiving a strong overall rating, this nursing home fared even better in our inspections category which is associated with the nursing home's recent inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A+ for that area, which is one of our highest grades. Inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category typically have few severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other achievements is its top-shelf long-term care score. It received one of our most favorable scores in that category, with a grade of A. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 84.797295 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a bit less than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Nursing grades are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last category we looked at was short-term care, was this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. This is one of the couple of weak links on a very solid report card. Our short-term care scores are likely more meaningful for individuals needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.