Valley Healthcare Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall score. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The second highest category we gave this nursing home in any category came in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a B-. In the category of long-term care, we weigh the quantity of services provided by a facility, as opposed to more healthcare-oriented services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.68848 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's third best category is short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Our short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The key is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

The final category we assessed was nursing, which ended up being a weak link for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a D in the area of nursing. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are seeing residents as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provided a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is not a very impressive figure. This facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this metric.