Avenues at Litchfield

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection ratings are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

An additional strength of this nursing home is its impressive grade in long-term care. We gave them one of our best scores in that category, with a score of A-. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this facility received an F for its short-term care grade. In our short-term care score, we seek to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Given its score in this area, we were not surprised to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

Moving on to the final category, this nursing home really didn't perform well. Due to a very poor grade of F in nursing, this was this nursing home's poorest category. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This facility fared well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.