Aston Park Health Care Center

Aston Park Health Care Center is one of 10 options in Asheville, North Carolina. It looks like this nursing home is one of the most elite facilities we looked at. A grade of this caliber requires excellent scores across the board. In fact, we ranked this facility in the top fifth of all nursing homes in the country. If you scroll down, you will see this nursing home's category scores, which are also impressive.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings aren't something to panic about.

This facility also received an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to be awarded more than one A+ category scores. In the category of short-term care, we strive to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it provided substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. This place performed as well as just about any facility in North Carolina in this area with 60.9 percent of its residents returning home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing grades are primarily based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides an incredible 4.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With under 5 percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared as well as any place North Carolina in this category. This is typically an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers can be avoided by offering better nursing care and having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

The next category we graded was long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a favorable grade of B. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the data points we considered on top of this facility's above average nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for seniors. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.