Valley Health Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Our nursing rating is based on a host of datapoints. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving patients more frequently.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for its long-term care grade. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 95.945946 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another impressive feature of this nursing home is its inspection rating. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Our inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our fourth area, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for this category. This finalized a straight A report card. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is generally a reliable measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.