Brookdale Spicewood Springs

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home has earned excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection ratings are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received a strong short-term care grade. Indeed, this is this nursing home's second strongest category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A. Short-term care scores are crucial for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Moving on our third area, we gave this facility a grade of A- for our long-term care rating. This is a very strong grade. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 95.74468 percent of its residents, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to our next area, this facility was given an extremely favorable nursing score. We gave it a grade of A- in that category, rounding out a straight A profile. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.