Brookside Care Strategies

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we gave it an A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid facilities that had a long list of severe deficiencies. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Unfortunately, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care score. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. With a grade in this range for this area, we weren't surprised to learn this facility was well below average in many staffing areas we assess. The nursing home offered substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

Tragically, this facility received an F for its long-term care score. Long-term care scores in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. It does not look like this facility submitted vaccination data. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

The next category we looked at is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home averaged only 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Lastly, to round out our nursing grade, we turn to some quality-focused statistics in rounding out our nursing grades. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.