Brookdale Westlake Hills

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is what you like to see on an inspection report.

Contributing to this nursing home's list of achievements, it also was awarded a first-rate short-term care score. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this area. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is often a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most other nursing homes. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

The next category we rated is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a favorable long-term care score this year, with a grade of B-. While this isn't nearly as impressive as some of its other grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable score in that category. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 67.164185 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly less than the national average. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.