Avenue at Wooster

With an address in Wooster, Ohio, Avenue at Wooster is one of seven nursing homes in the city. We gave this facility a B overall, which is a solid grade. We were equally impressed that Wooster received a B+ city grade, making this one of the best places to find a nursing home. Based on our analysis, you could do much worse than this facility. This facility's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection rating, which we will address in the next paragraph.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility truly excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Very few nursing homes performed more favorably in this category. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. This facility is above the national average in terms of both its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 61.5 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing rating looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which was above the national average. Finally, this nursing home was also above average in each of the major quality-based metrics we assessed in this category. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The next area we rated is long-term care. It received an abysmal F in this category, which is an abysmal score. We would not simply dismiss a facility because of a single terrible category though. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. In addition to offering respectable levels of nurse staffing, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. These scores were clearly more impressive than some of its other statistics in this category. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.5 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.