Avalon Springs Place

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this critical area. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the category of long-term care. We gave them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a score of B+. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 94.347824 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

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. The nursing rating weighs a variety of datapoints. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we scored was short-term care, in which we awarded it a strong grade of B. This nursing home truly did not have any weak categories. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is considered to be a solid assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.