Avalon Place

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. This is far better than its overall grade. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area typically have very few severe deficiencies. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this facility's higher category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 95.170456 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's third most favorable category came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a C. Short-term care grades are generally employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

The next category we assessed is nursing, which ended up being this nursing home's worst category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this area. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall profile to some degree. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This facility averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found this facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing grade substantially.