Avoca Specialty Care

This nursing home's nursing grade is notably better than its overall grade. With a strong performance in this category, it received a quality score in that category with a grade of B. The nursing score is based on many factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's second best category is inspections. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. It actually outperformed most nursing homes in this category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also gave this nursing home a solid grade in the area of long-term care, with a C. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 93.37748 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this place keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we scored is short-term care, ended up being this facility's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that area. In determining these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Considering its score in this area, we weren't surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.