Avalon Care Center - Sonora

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. The nursing grade analyzes quite a few components, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

We were also stunned to learn that this nursing home received a solid short-term care score in our assessment. We awarded it a grade of B- in that area. In our short-term care score, we try to forge a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze a facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility was given a grade of just D in that area. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.97698 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we looked at is inspections. Unfortunately, this ended up being this facility's weakest link. We gave it a D in this area. Since this information is collected by government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our assessment. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.