Ashton Medical Lodge

Although we didn't grade this nursing home favorably overall, we did give it an excellent grade in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Our inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility's long-term care rating is one of its respectable scores. The facility was awarded a grade of B- in this area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.29269 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another issue is the F this facility received in the area of short-term care. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Based on its grade in this area, we were not stunned to discover that this place was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The final area we analyzed was nursing. Sadly, it received an F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. When determining our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.