Brighton Gardens of Omaha

We also wanted to point out that this facility earned near flawless government inspections recently. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A+. We weighed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving patients even once per day.

The third area we analyzed is short-term care. This facility was superb in our short-term care category also. We gave them a dominant grade of A+ in this area. Our short-term care scores are considered to be more critical for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The last category we scored is long-term care. We awarded them another superb grade of A+ in this area. This topped off a amazing profile of four A+'s. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.