Avenue at Aurora

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that area with an A+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so favorably is that it received a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, short-term care ended up being its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. Short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our better scores in our long-term care category as well, with a B. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we graded is nursing. In this area, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of B. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality measures we assessed. For example, in terms of the number of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented with better nursing care.