Avalon Healthcare Center

In addition to performing well overall, this facility earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A+. Inspection scores are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another reason we graded this facility so favorably is that it was given an A+ long-term care score. This is simply as elite as it gets in this category. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

This nursing home's worst area is short-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. In this category, we gave this facility a grade of just D. We wanted to draw your attention to this possible weak link, however, you shouldn't focus exclusively on one bad area either. With our short-term care category, we endeavor to forge a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.