Valley View Home: 37 Days Without Nursing Director - MT
The previous Director of Nursing stopped working at the facility sometime before September 8, 2025. That morning, at 2:34 a.m., staff member A sent an email announcing the departure and posted an advertisement for the position. The email also noted that the interdisciplinary team would absorb the DON's responsibilities in the meantime. What the facility could not produce, when inspectors arrived on January 29, was any documentation showing those duties had been formally assigned to a registered nurse, or to multiple RNs, in any structured way.
Nobody had put it in writing.
Staff member B and staff member C told inspectors that morning that the facility had been without a DON for a little over a month. The actual gap, according to records reviewed during the inspection, was 37 days. A new DON, staff member B, started on October 16, 2025. A second email from staff member A, sent that afternoon at 3:26 p.m., confirmed the start date.
The inspection was a complaint survey, conducted January 29, 2026. Inspectors cited the violation as affecting many residents and assessed the level of harm as minimal harm or potential for actual harm.
That assessment, minimal harm, reflects the lowest tier of the federal harm scale. But it does not mean nothing happened. It means inspectors could not document that residents were injured. What they could document was that the position responsible for overseeing all nursing care at the facility sat vacant for more than five weeks, and that the tasks attached to it were divided informally among a team without any written record of who was responsible for what.
The Director of Nursing at a long-term care facility is not an administrative title on an organizational chart. The DON sets staffing levels, oversees care plans, monitors medication administration, handles nursing complaints, and is the person other nurses escalate to when something goes wrong with a resident. When that role is empty and its responsibilities are floating, the question of who is accountable for any given decision becomes genuinely unclear.
Valley View Home is a nursing facility in Glasgow, a city of roughly 3,000 people in northeastern Montana. It serves as one of the primary long-term care options for a region where the next facility may be an hour's drive away. The residents affected by this finding were not a handful of people. Inspectors noted the vacancy affected many residents.
The facility did move to fill the position. The job posting went up the same day the previous DON left. A new DON was in place 37 days later. But in the gap between those two dates, the inspection record shows no formal structure governing who held the clinical authority the DON position carries.
Staff member A, who sent both emails and appears to have been managing the transition, told inspectors the new DON started October 16. That account matched the documentation. What the documentation did not match was any evidence that the interim arrangement, the IDT dividing DON tasks, had been formalized in a way that assigned specific nursing oversight responsibilities to specific licensed nurses.
Dividing tasks among a team is not inherently wrong. Facilities sometimes manage leadership transitions that way. The problem here, as inspectors framed it, was the absence of documentation showing the prior DON's duties were specifically reassigned to an RN or multiple RNs. Without that paper trail, there is no way to reconstruct, after the fact, who was responsible for a nursing decision made on day 12 of the vacancy, or day 25, or day 36.
That gap in accountability is what the citation captures.
The violation was cited under the requirement that facilities designate a full-time Director of Nursing. The finding stood on its own, supported by the emails, the staff interviews, and the absence of reassignment records. Inspectors did not document specific resident harm tied to the vacancy. What they documented was a facility that went more than a month without the person whose job it is to make sure the nursing care is being done right, and without a clear record of who was supposed to fill that role in the meantime.
The residents at Valley View Home during those 37 days did not know the position was empty. Their families likely did not know either.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Valley View Home from 2026-01-29 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: August 15, 2026 · Our methodology
VALLEY VIEW HOME in GLASGOW, MT was cited for violations during a health inspection on January 29, 2026.
The previous Director of Nursing stopped working at the facility sometime before September 8, 2025.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.