Ansted Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and 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. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also gave this facility a strong grade in short-term care. This nursing home received a B in this category, which happens to be one of our better scores. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is generally a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care, where this facility received a C in this area. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is higher than most nursing homes. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we rated is nursing, was this nursing home's least impressive category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in that area. The nursing score assesses several subcategories, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is well below average. This nursing home also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and we were very disappointed. This facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.