Astoria Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation

Although this nursing home's overall grade was terrible, it actually performed pretty well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We awarded this facility just a D for our short-term care grade and that actually wound up as its second highest category. Short-term care ratings are important for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With its abysmal grade in this area, we weren't shocked to discover that this nursing home offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.

This facility ended up receiving rock bottom score in our nursing category. It received an F in this category. When determining our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we assessed is long-term care. This facility was given an abysmal grade of F in this area. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 86.666664 percent of its residents. This is several points below what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.