Aspen Transitional Rehabilitation

To pair with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility an elite grade of A+ for its short-term care score. Our short-term care scores are probably more meaningful for those requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient at least once a day.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility was awarded a dominant grade of A in our long-term care category. For patients in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. 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 a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. This finished off a straight A report card for this nursing home. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government 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.