Brendan House

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a strong short-term care score. In that category, we gave this facility an A. In calculating our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's inspection reports. We awarded it a grade of A for that category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. There are numerous criteria within this grade. Most of these subcategories are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a resident even once per day.

The final category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility was given a grade of A-. This topped off a first-rate profile. Only a select few nursing homes earned an A- or higher in each of our categories. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.655174 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.