Avenues at Litchfield

This facility really performed well in our long-term care category, with an A in this area. This really helped its overall score quite a bit. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.18368 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Inspections is another category where this facility excelled. In fact, we awarded this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing rating. We gave this nursing home an D. Our nursing score is primarily associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. With a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This place fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's least impressive category is short-term care, which is the last area we analyzed. It received a lowly F for this area. In spite of multiple acceptable scores in other categories, this grade is still disappointing so we would like to to draw your attention to it. Short-term care ratings are vital for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. It appears that this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the data we assessed. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.