Avalon Springs Health Campus

To go along with its strong overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is considered to be a solid assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

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. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 place Indiana in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient more frequently.

Turning to our fourth category, this facility also excelled in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ for this area. This finalized a very impressive profile. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the statistics we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 93.93939 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the nursing home population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.