Aldersly Skilled Nursing Facility

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered after this nursing home's impressive nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for seniors. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A+. The nursing score includes several components, however, the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provided 6.7 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This was one of the highest totals we found. Furthermore, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. With less than 5 percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is usually a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls. Many pressure ulcers could be avoided by providing better nursing care and a policy of moving patients more frequently.

In the next category we looked at, this facility received quality marks in the area of short-term care. Consequently, it was given one of our most impressive scores in that area with a of A+. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. This nursing home provided more registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. This is what we like to find when assessing a nursing home in this category. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home with 69 percent of its residents returning home.

Adding to its other impressive category grades, we gave this nursing home a score of B+ for its inspection grade. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.