Audubon Retirement Village

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed as well in this area. Inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this nursing home was given high marks in the area of long-term care. For this reason, it received one of our highest scores in that area with a grade of A+. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.09091 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. There are a variety of criteria within this grade. Most of the subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The next category we graded is short-term care, which proved to be a weak link for this nursing home. We gave this facility a grade of D for the area of short-term care, rendering this the nursing home's weakest category grade. We would still recommend that you look at the bigger picture. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home provided less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care score.