Brookside Multicare Nursing Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong facility is that it received a very impressive inspection rating. Inspections is its best category. In this category, we gave this facility an A. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it was awarded a very impressive long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care turned out to be its second most impressive category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.56484 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing score focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

Switching gears to our last area, we gave this facility a grade of D for our short-term care category. This is the facility's weakest category rating. Naturally, this grade hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is considered to be a solid measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. It appears that this facility was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the staffing figures we assessed. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.8 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below the national average.