Bonnie Brae Convalescent Hospital

This nursing home's best category grade came in nursing. In this area, we gave this nursing home a B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. We looked at the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving residents more frequently.

This facility also earned a very favorable inspection rating. Its inspection score turned out to be its second best category. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also would like to note that this facility received impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our better grades in this area, with a grade of B. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 98.73418 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we scored is short-term care. It received a lowly F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is obviously a major disappointment. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is more often than not a fair measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Based on its score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 2.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.