Avamere Transitional Care at Sunnyside

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that category. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

We were also stunned to learn that this facility earned a reasonably solid short-term care score this year. We gave it a grade of B- in that area. Our short-term care grades are probably most important for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We wanted to note that this nursing home received an F for its inspection rating. An F in this category is alarming because it usually points to red flags on the nursing home's government inspections. When a place has this bad of an inspection grade, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular nursing home had multiple category G through L deficiencies, which rank among the more severe deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies identified by the government inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to patients. In addition to having severe deficiencies, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

The last category we looked at was long-term care. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is an abysmal grade. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinates 94.23077 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.