Brethren Retirement Community

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also earned first-rate health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of A. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically dodged 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 an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so favorably is that it was awarded a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care ended up being its second highest category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A-. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this nursing home also received favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with a score of B. Our short-term care grade is often employed to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Switching gears to our final area, this nursing home received an excellent nursing rating. This facility didn't turn out to have any real weak links. Nursing scores are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.