Aspen Park Rehabilitation

On top of earning a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ in short-term care. Short-term care grades are crucial for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 7.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively 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.

Moving on our next area, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our long-term care rating. This is a very strong rating. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the next category, this facility was awarded an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that area, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Our nursing grade is largely tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.