Brookfield Healthcare Center

Brookfield Healthcare Center is one of four nursing homes in Downey, California. This nursing home received a strong overall score of B, resulting in it grading out better than the average nursing home in Downey. As far as we can see, this nursing home looks like a solid choice for most people. This nursing home was better in some categories than others, but it didn't have any poor grades in any of our four major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Contributing to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this category. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home had 3.59 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this wasn't as favorable as some of its other scores in this category, this number can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the medical complexity of residents.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our more positive grades in our short-term care category as well, with a grade of B. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. One reason for this place's strong rating in this category is that it provides a significantly larger volume of hours of physical therapy to its residents than the average facility. The last item we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that it performed better than most facilities in this area with 51 percent of its residents returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

The last category we rated is nursing. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in that category. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This nursing home was above average in several of the major data points we assessed, with good scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are sometimes good measures of the quality of nursing care available.