Avante at Ocala

Although we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively favorable health inspections in recent years. We gave it a respectable grade of B+ in this category, which is much better than its overall score. Our inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities with severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

The second best area we awarded this facility in any category came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. Long-term care grades focus on a nursing home's personal care rather than the highly skilled nursing or healthcare services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 90.83095 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be significantly less than average. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Nursing scores are primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This place offered a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This number is well below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we graded was short-term care. This facility was given a rock bottom grade of F in that area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we discovered that this nursing home offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.