Brookdale Richmond Heights

Brookdale Richmond Heights is located in Cleveland, Ohio. This city is one of the largest cities in the country with has a population of 769,341 people. It looks like this nursing home is ranked among the higher-graded facilities we assessed. A grade in this range requires very strong scores across the board. Indeed, we were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it substantially ahead of the vast majority of the nursing homes in Cleveland. Lastly, this nursing home's ownership changed in the last year, so we will need to monitor it to confirm it maintains its high level of care.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. With our short-term care grade, we seek to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we assessed. It offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than a typical facility. This is generally an excellent sign. The last metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Ohio in this area with 76.9 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

In addition, this facility also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that area with a score of A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our nursing grade is largely tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 5.5 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last area we looked at turned out to be this nursing home's weakest area. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still gave it an acceptable grade of B- for our long-term care category. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of providing very respectable levels of nursing care and other staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.82609 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. This combination proved to be effective as this place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.