Brookdale Riverwalk Skilled Nursing

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home an impressive grade of A for short-term care. With our short-term care category, we seek to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an B+. We looked at the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of B- for our inspections rating. This is a very respectable nursing score. Inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Moving on to our fourth category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D in the area of long-term care. This is the nursing home's worst category grade. Of course, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 98.540146 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.