Brookdale Alamo Heights

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an A. Few facilities fared better in this category. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Building on its impressive resume, this place also excelled in the category of nursing. We awarded it a grade of B+ for that category. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility received a good score in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

The last category we rated proved to be this facility's worst area. However, even in its weakest link we still gave it a respectable grade of B- in our long-term care category. Our long-term care grades are more critical for those requiring more conventional services related to activities of daily living. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.