Aspen Ridge Transitional Rehab

Aspen Ridge Transitional Rehab is located in the large metropolitan area of Salt Lake City, Utah. Sporting an overall score of A-, we found this facility as one of the top five nursing homes in the city. An overall score in this range is a good indication of a world class facility. Salt Lake City features many other nursing homes, but we question whether you will need to check out too many others. This one looks like a first class option. The best aspect of this nursing home's strong report card is its short-term care score. We discuss short-term care in the next section

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ in short-term care. Short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 68.8 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor dings are not something to panic about.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provided 5.6 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This was one of the more impressive totals we found. In addition, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of offering high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the nation in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care offered.

The last area we assessed was long-term care. This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care score this year, with a grade of B-. Although this was not nearly as dominant as some of its other category grades, this is still a decent grade for that category. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.