Brookhaven Health Care Facility

On top of being an elite facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed this well in this area. Our inspection scores are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't 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.

Adding to its fine assessment, this nursing home also was awarded an excellent short-term care grade, with a grade of A-. Short-term care scores are crucial for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility also was awarded a dominant long-term care grade. This actually is its third strongest category score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Switching gears to the next area, this nursing home was given a very strong nursing rating. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in that area, topping off one of our finer profiles. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses commit to patients and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.