Brookdale Overland Park

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also received an A+ short-term care grade. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 66.7 percent of its residents returning home.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. Inspection scores are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. We assessed the levels of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides an incredible 4.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of nursing care, this place also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls resulting in serious injury, this place performed as well as any facility Kansas.

The final category we assessed was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B. This actually turned out to be this facility's worst category. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when their poorest grade still outperforms most nursing homes. Facilities that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of offering elite levels of nursing care, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.