Avalon Springs Place

With an address in Mercer, Pennsylvania, Avalon Springs Place is one of just a couple available nursing homes in the city. We awarded this facility an overall grade of B. A grade in this range requires quality scores in most areas. Based on our assessment, this facility looks like a good fit for most people. This facility's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection score, which is addressed in the next section.

On top of receiving a great overall score, this place also received top notch government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in this category, with an A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Adding to its impressive resume, this place also excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ for that category. In computing a facility's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which was among the highest totals we found. Lastly, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it fared as well as any facility the state in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a grade of B. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. This facility's vaccination data weren't as favorable some of its other datapoints in this category, such as its nursing hours data. It gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 87.951805 percent of its patients. We would like to see some improvement herein this statistic in the future. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care, which ended up being this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that category. Of course, this score hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. Short-term care ratings are important for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. We found that this nursing home was subpar in two of the key staffing areas we focus on. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 33 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this facility's short-term care score.