Avon Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility also was awarded a favorable short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is more often than not a meaningful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last category we scored was nursing. We awarded this facility a solid score in that category, with a grade of B-. Even though this wasn't as strong as some of this nursing home's other scores, it is still nothing to be ashamed of. Our nursing rating weighs many components, most of which are based on nursing hours. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place.