Valley Oaks Care Center

Valley Oaks Care Center is an average-sized facility located in East Liverpool, Ohio. Featuring an overall score of F, we consider this to be a lower end facility. Based on our analysis, this facility probably isn't a good fit for anyone. If you aren't deterred by this facility's profile, feel free to continue reading to find out about its category scores. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

While we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it actually earned an impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid places that had too many severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility also didn't perform terribly in the area of short-term care. In fact, we gave it a C in that area, which wound up being another one of its higher grades. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is typically a useful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was a much stronger area for this facility. It outperformed most nursing homes in this area with 56.2 percent of its patients returning home. This really boosted its grade in this area.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's third highest score was long-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still performed relatively poorly. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.809525 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we graded was nursing, where this facility was given a rock bottom score in this category also. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is definitely a major disappointment. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses commit to patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided just 2.9 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is not a very impressive figure. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.