Valley Healthcare Center

We gave this nursing home one of our better scores in our long-term care rating, where it earned a B. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility also earned a decent inspection grade. This turned out to be its second best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. 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. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. When calculating our nursing ratings, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This facility averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient more frequently.

The final area we looked at was short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its level of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The critical question is whether this also affected quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.