Brookside Rehab & Nursing Center

While this place's overall score was as bad as it gets, it performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. Inspection scores weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid facilities with too many deficiencies flagged. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Sadly, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its long-term care rating, which turns out to be one of its better category grades. Facilities that don't fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 44.594593 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a few points less than the national average. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. Nursing scores are mostly based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular place offered a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This statistic is far below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we looked at was short-term care. It received a lowly F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. Our short-term care grades are considered to be most meaningful for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With a score this poor in this category, we were not stunned to discover this nursing home was below average in many staffing figures we looked at. In fact, it offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.5 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.