Avalon Place

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Our nursing score is largely based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our next area, this nursing home also earned a grade of B for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this area. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 96.788994 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to our last category, this nursing home received an acceptable short-term care rating. Although this was not quite as impressive as many of its other scores, this is truly not the end of the world. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is often a reliable measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 3.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.