Avante at Leesburg

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home also earned an elite long-term care rating. We gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of A+. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections, which is based on its recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of C in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing score is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a patient at least once a day.

Moving on to the fourth area, this facility received a C in short-term care, which is generally a respectable grade. In the category of short-term care, we seek to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. We were not able to find information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.