Autumn View Health Care Facility

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A+. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

We also awarded this facility a strong grade in long-term care. This nursing home earned a grade of B+ in this category, which is one of our better grades. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.13043 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. In forming these short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this facility's short-term care score.

Turning to our fourth category, we gave this nursing home a D for our nursing category. This is the nursing home's weakest category rating. Sadly, this score hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Nursing scores are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really pulled down this facility's nursing score substantially.