Avalon Place

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home earned near flawless health inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its dominant profile, this nursing home also excelled in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a score of A- for that category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. There are a variety of factors within this category. Most of the subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning patients more frequently.

The last area we analyzed was short-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our higher scores in that category, with a B. Although this wasn't on par with several of this nursing home's other scores, it is nevertheless a perfectly acceptable grade. Our short-term care scores are crucial for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.