Brookdale Prospect Heights

In addition to being a first-rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. In our short-term care assessment, we seek to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. 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. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home with 75.4 percent of its residents returning home.

Adding to its first-rate profile, this nursing home also excelled in our long-term care category. In fact, it received a grade of A in that area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another quality feature of this nursing home is its inspection grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The final category we looked at is nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of A. This rounded out a very favorable profile. Not many nursing homes received an A- or higher in every single category. Our nursing rating consists of many components, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This place boasts an impressive 4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, of which more than an hour of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is among the most highly skilled levels of nurses. Finally, this nursing home was also above average in each of the major quality measures we assessed in this category. By way of illustration, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.