Avalon Nursing Home

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Adding to its fine assessment, this facility also was given a strong short-term care grade, with a grade of A-. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most important for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The last area we rated was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B+. This finished off a very impressive profile. Very few nursing homes received a B+ or higher in every single category. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.