Ashtabula County Medical Cente

Ashtabula County Medical Cente is one of four nursing homes located in Ashtabula, Ohio. With an overall rating of A+, this facility is ranked among the top nursing homes we found. Not surprisingly, this is substantially better than many of the facilities in the city. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's stellar report card is its inspection score. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home performed well in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Very few places performed this well in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. 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.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A+. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This place boasts a really impressive 7.7 hours of nursing care per resident daily, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. On top of offering high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home in the state in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care provided.

The next category we assessed was short-term care. This nursing home also was awarded an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to be awarded more than one A+ category grades. In the area of short-term care, we strive to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Ohio in this area with 67.9 percent of its residents returning home.

In our final category, this nursing home was given another A+ for its long-term care grade, topping off an incredible profile of straight A+'s in all four categories. In a long-term care setting, 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. One of the data points we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.