Brookdale Rancho Mirage

In addition to earning a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We awarded them one of our better grades in that area, with an impressive grade of A. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is generally a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This facility also performed well in the area of inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with an B+. Few facilities with an overall score in this range performed this well in multiple categories. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Our nursing grade is based on several components, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home averages just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is a very low figure. Finally, nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

Moving on to our final category, this facility received a grade of C for long-term care, which we consider to be an acceptable score. Our long-term care grades are based on a nursing home's volume of care. This includes a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate this place's vaccination data. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.