Astoria Health & Rehab Center

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially would like to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it an A+ in this area. Our inspection grades are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other achievements is its first-rate long-term care score. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a grade of A. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we assessed is short-term care. Unfortunately, we awarded this nursing home a relatively poor grade in the area of short-term care, with a grade of D. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most critical for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. It looks like this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home's least impressive category is nursing, which is the last category we scored. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a D. The nursing category is based on quite a few factors, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This facility fared well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.