Ashton Health and Rehabilitation

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with a grade of A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. This nursing home received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also would like to note that this nursing home was awarded positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our higher grades in that category, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest score. Short-term care grades are often used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Next we wanted to quickly point out one of this facility's major weaknesses. In the area of nursing care, we gave this nursing home a lowly grade of F. Our nursing grade weighs many factors, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This place averaged only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This place fared well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's weakest area is long-term care, which is the final area we analyzed. We gave it an abysmal F for this area. Even with several solid grades in other areas, this grade is still disappointing so we would like to to point it out. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of considering the amount 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 96.47436 percent of its residents, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.