Brookdale Anderson

In addition to being a first-rate facility overall, this facility also excelled at short-term care, where it received an A+. Short-term care scores are meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing. This includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing score is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning residents even once per day.

Switching gears to the final category, this facility received an excellent long-term care grade. We gave it a grade of A in that area, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.