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+. For patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 81.16592 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third category we analyzed is short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a solid grade of B-. Our short-term care scores are probably most critical for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Moving on to our next category, this facility received an acceptable nursing rating. Even though this is not nearly as elite as a few of its other grades, this is really a middle of the pack score. There are quite a few subcategories within this category. Many of the data points are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.