Brandenburg Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this facility's higher category grades came in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B+. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 21.649485 percent of its residents. This is a bit lower than we anticipated. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we looked at is short-term care. This facility's was given a low-end short-term care score where it was given a lowly F. With our short-term care category, we strive to forge a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Based on its grade in this area, we weren't stunned to find that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.5 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

This facility's worst category is nursing, which is the final category we looked at. We gave it an abysmal F for this category. Despite some acceptable grades in other categories, this grade is still disappointing so we wanted to make a note of it. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This facility offered a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This statistic is significantly below the national average. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this facility's nursing grade significantly.