Valley View Senior Life

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing score includes several factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Kansas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more often.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few nursing homes performed as well in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Moving on our third category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for its short-term care grade. This is a first-rate score. In the area of short-term care, we strive to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last category we looked at is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our higher scores in this area, with a grade of B. Although this isn't on par with some of this nursing home's other grades, it is still a perfectly acceptable score. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.55157 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.