Brook at High Falls

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second best category was its short-term care grade, where it received a B-. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is often a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In calculating our nursing scores, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This facility averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed well in this metric. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient even once per day.

The last area we looked at was long-term care, which was this nursing home's least impressive category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is certainly very concerning. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category likely don't provide the type of consistent 24/7 care that some other nursing homes provide. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 93.24324 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is somewhat less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.