Brighton Gardens of Prairie Village

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. Our short-term care grades are likely most important for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an B+. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 place Kansas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient more often.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

The last area we assessed is long-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave it a lowly F in this area, which is obviously a bit of a concern. For patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.1831 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable datapoint. Surprisingly, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.