Brookshire Nursing Center

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best grades in that area with an A. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive scores in that category, with a grade of B+. This turned out to be the facility's second highest grade. Short-term care grades are typically used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we assessed was long-term care, ended up being this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. This really was one of the couple of weak links of an otherwise impressive report card. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the data points we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.187 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.