Brookdale San Dimas

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent nursing rating. We awarded them an A- in this category. Our nursing rating consists of many subcategories, however, the most important one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

Contributing to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also was awarded a high-end short-term care score. We gave them a dominant grade of A- in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it an impressive grade of A- for that category, which is among our best grades. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. While this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor dings aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's worst category is long-term care, which is the final area we assessed. For this area, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.