Avante at St Cloud

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also performed well in our long-term care category, where it earned an A+. Few facilities fared better in this category. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.73333 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection 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.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Our nursing score weighs a variety of datapoints. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. 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 place 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.

The next area we scored was short-term care. We awarded this facility a decent grade in this area, with a grade of B-. Even though this was not as favorable as several of this facility's other scores, it is still not the end of the world. In our short-term care assessment, we strive to craft a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.