Brightwood Center

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with an A. This is a notably better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. Sadly, this nursing home was hit with a category L deficiency, which was not what we expected based on its inspection score. This category of deficiency indicates inspectors identified a widespread deficiency putting patient safety or health in imminent danger. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

Additionally, we awarded this facility a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our more impressive scores. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. When computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses commit to residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat discouraging figure which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The last category we looked at is short-term care. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is obviously a major concern. In our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.