Avoca Specialty Care

This facility earned a nursing rating which is stronger than its overall grade. We awarded this nursing home an above average score of B+ in this category. There are numerous factors within this area. Most of the subcategories are tied to nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home was awarded strong short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our better scores in this category, with a B. This proved to be the nursing home's second highest score. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home received a solid inspection report this year as well, with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that category with a score of B-. Our inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you 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. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

The last area we scored is long-term care, which is this facility's worst area. It received an F for this category, which is obviously very disappointing. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home didn't perform well in our measures relating to patient care. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated just 62.18487 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.