Avamere Transitional Care and Rehabilitation

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its fine profile, this nursing home also was awarded a dominant short-term care score, with a grade of A. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category, this nursing home also received an impressive nursing rating, with a grade of A-. This wrapped up a rare straight A report card. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 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 place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.