Ashford Hall

On top of earning a great overall score, this nursing home performed even better in our inspections category which is based on the facility's recent inspections. In fact, we gave it an A- for this category, which is one of our best grades. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Contributing to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B for its short-term care rating. This is an above average score in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is typically a meaningful measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B. It performed better than most nursing homes in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.01492 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we assessed is nursing, where we awarded it a strong grade of B. This nursing home really didn't have any weak links. There are numerous criteria included in this grade. Most of the criteria are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.