Avalon Care Center - Pullman

We awarded this facility one of our better scores in short-term care, where it earned an A. This is much better than its overall grade, which was certainly not elite. With our short-term care rating, we strive to create a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an B+. Our nursing rating is based on several subcategories. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We gave this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care score. This is well below average in this category. For residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 97.82609 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning the final category of inspections, this nursing home did not fare well. It received an F in this category. This dragged this nursing home's overall grade down as we heavily weight this category. For places that received this bad of an inspection rating, we recommend scrutinizing any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular nursing home had 7 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, we need to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently of over $100,000. This often suggests that a bad track record spanned multiple years.