Valley West Health Care Center

We awarded this facility one of our better grades in the area of short-term care, where it earned an A. This is much better than its overall grade, which was certainly not elite. Our short-term care scores are important for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing services. This includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to the category of nursing, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- in that area. When calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home's next highest category ended up being its long-term care score, where it received a grade of C. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.95918 percent of its residents, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning our final category of inspections, this nursing home received an F in this area. This score was very detrimental to this facility's overall score. When a facility has this bad of an inspection score, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This particular facility was hit with 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, we need to point out that this place was assessed large government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home's poor track record has been an issue for multiple years.