Valley Health Care Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for its inspection grade. This score is far more impressive than its overall score. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we awarded this facility a grade of B in our long-term care category. This is one of our better scores. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 78.44827 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for 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 performed remarkably well in this statistic. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning patients more often.

Switching gears to the last category, we gave this facility a grade of D for the area of short-term care. This was the facility's worst category score. Short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a score in this range for this area, we weren't shocked to find this nursing home was well below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it supplied significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home.