Brookdale Willowbrook Place

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. The nursing score includes several subcategories, however, the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home Texas in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents more frequently.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our stronger scores in our long-term care category as well, with a B+. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category we assessed, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a B+. Inspection scores weigh several factors included in 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 usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.