Avante at Inverness

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it was given a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second most favorable category score. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.70968 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also gave this facility a middle of the road score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a B-. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is frequently a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. We weren't able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this place. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 5.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The final area we analyzed was nursing. In this category, we gave this nursing home a decent grade of C. This was this facility's worst area. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Lastly, although this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of our quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this area.