Alston Brook

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it an A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid places with a bunch of deficiencies flagged. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this facility was awarded a grade of just D in that area. Sadly, this proved to be one of its best areas. If you are seeking anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid figure. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Considering its grade in this area, we were not surprised to find that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5.3 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

Switching gears to our final area, this nursing home didn't perform well in this category either. Due to a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is about as bad as it gets. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are caring for residents and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averaged only 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is well below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.