Ashbrook Care & Rehabilitation Center

With an address in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, Ashbrook Care & Rehabilitation Center is the lone option located there. With an A- overall grade, we ranked this facility in the top third of all nursing homes in the nation. Based on our analysis, you can not go wrong here. This nursing home's impressive report card was highlighted by its inspection rating, which you can find in the next section.

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was superb in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home does not take any chances. The last datapoint we looked at was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 2.27 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this facility was given a superb grade of A- in our short-term care category. Our short-term care grades are arguably more meaningful for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, we found that this nursing home provided respectable levels of physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. It performed as well as just about any nursing home in New Jersey in this area with 56.8 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home was given a decent nursing rating. Although this wasn't as dominant as a few of its other grades, this is really not the end of the world. There are many subcategories within this area. Many of these data points are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, nursing ratings also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.