Ayers Nursing Home

This nursing home received a strong overall score as discussed above, but we wanted to point out its excellent long-term care rating. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its recent government inspections. We awarded it an B+ for that area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't consider 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.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to our last area, we gave this facility a grade of D for our short-term care category. This is the facility's least impressive category grade. Of course, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most meaningful for folks needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, 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 measures we assessed. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.3 percent of its patients returning home.