Brookdale San Dimas

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it actually received a very impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our best scores in that area with a grade of A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We gave this nursing home just a D for our short-term care grade and that actually turned out to be its next most favorable score. Short-term care ratings are important for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. As you might expect, we discovered that this facility provides substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical nursing home. Finally, we considered the number of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

In addition, we gave this facility an F in the area of nursing care. There are quite a few subcategories included in this grade. Many of the subcategories reflect nurse staffing. This place averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is an alarmingly low total. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to our next category, this nursing home did not perform well in this category either. With a poor grade of F in long-term care, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.