Brookhaven Nursing & Rehab

While we were not very complementary of this nursing home's overall score, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility's second highest area was its short-term care score, where it was awarded a C. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last category we graded was long-term care, proved to be this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we looked at. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 58.208958 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.