Brookdale Bear Creek

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 grade is typically employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed as well in this area. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Our nursing grade considers numerous datapoints. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This nursing home's worst category is long-term care, which is the last category we looked at. In this category, we gave this nursing home an D. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable datapoint. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.