Valley Palms Care Center

Although we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B+ for our inspections category. This score is far better than the place's overall score. Our inspection scores are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we awarded this facility an B-. Nursing scores are primarily associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This place averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is a very low figure. Lastly, nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The third area we graded is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of C in this area. In our long-term care category, we analyze the volume of services provided by a facility, along with some qualitative datapoints. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is better than most nursing homes. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we scored was short-term care, turned out to be this facility's worst area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that area. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. With its grade in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the figures we assessed. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.8 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.