Brethren Retirement Community

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive grade in inspections. In fact, inspections ended up being its best category. In that category, we awarded this nursing home 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.

This nursing home also was awarded a very strong long-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being its second strongest category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.744774 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. The nursing grade is based on numerous factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

The next category we assessed was short-term care. This facility was given an impressive nursing rating in our assessment, with a grade of B. Although this was not quite as strong as a few of its other scores, this is still one of the stronger scores for this category. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.