Avalon Care Center - Pullman

Avalon Care Center - Pullman is a small nursing home located in Pullman, Washington. We gave this nursing home an overall grade of B. A grade in this range requires respectable marks in most areas. Based on our ratings, this nursing home looks like a good fit for most people. This facility is better in some categories than others, but it didn't have any bad scores in any of our major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received even higher grades in the category of short-term care. In fact, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A+. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This place outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 61.3 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to another one of this place's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that area, we gave this facility an B+. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Our nursing category assesses a handful of datapoints, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This place provides an impressive 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Of this total, nearly one quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most highly skilled levels of nurses. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Our next category is long-term care, in which we gave this nursing home a grade of C in this category. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered after this nursing home's quality nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.