Wellbrooke of Avon

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it earned a very impressive grade in inspections. In fact, inspections ended up being its best category. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also was elite in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A-. Only a select group of nursing homes fared better in this category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility was given a strong long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area with a score of B+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 94.23077 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients 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 area we rated was this facility's weakest category. However, even its worst category would actually be a highlight for most facilities. In fact, we awarded it a strong grade of B in our nursing category. When computing our nursing scores, we assess both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.