Aspen Ridge Transitional Rehab

In addition to being a great facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are nearly flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A+ for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 7.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Adding to its strong profile, this nursing home also received a superb long-term care grade, with a score of A. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on vaccination rates. 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 a remarkably low number.

The fourth category we looked at was nursing, where this facility was awarded a grade of A. This topped off a very favorable profile. Few nursing homes earned an A- or higher in every category. In calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both staffing levels and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.