Brookdale Easley

While we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. This score is more respectable than this facility's overall score. Our inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing score is mostly based on the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is well below average. Finally, although this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric.

This nursing home was given its third best category grade in the area of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a B- in this category, which is a decent score. With our short-term care grade, we try to craft a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 6.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Our last category is long-term care, where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B- in this area. Our long-term care scores are more important for people needing more conventional assistance related to personal care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this facility vaccinated only 56.25 percent of its residents, which is somewhat alarming. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.