Avalon Place Wharton

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's second best category is long-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category likely don't provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities provide. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 93.38843 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly lower than we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. The nursing rating includes a number of factors. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these datapoints to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home really didn't perform well here either. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. Our short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. With its score in this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.