Avalon Villa Health Care

While we didn't give this facility a good overall score, we actually gave it a very strong grade in the area of nursing, where it earned a B+. This is better than most nursing homes in this area. There are numerous criteria included in this grade. Most of the subcategories reflect nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next highest score was short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed relatively badly. Short-term care scores are critical for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. With a score in this range in this area, we were not shocked to learn this nursing home was well below average in the two key staffing figures we assess. In fact, it provided far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.5 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this facility was awarded a grade of just D in this category. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility provided the vaccine to a relatively low 79.60199 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.

Turning our final area of inspections, this facility received an F here. You should pay special attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We recommend you scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was assessed 9 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a threat to resident health or safety. Finally, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this place received significant government fines recently in excess of $50,000. This generally suggests that government inspectors became frustrated after several years of failed government inspections.