Asbury Park

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Additionally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was given impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in this category, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second best grade. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 83.28267 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, 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 an impressively low figure.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most other nursing homes. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

Switching gears to our fourth category, we gave this nursing home a D in our short-term care category. This is the facility's worst category score. Of course, this score pulled down the nursing home's overall grade a bit. In the category of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.