Brookside Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center

In addition to having a decent overall rating, we also want to point out that this place earned favorable inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in this category, with a B. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall score. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home was given its second best category grade in the category of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a B- in this area, which is an acceptable score. In computing our short-term care grades, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is considered to be a fair assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We found that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This place averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is well below average. Finally, our nursing ratings also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

Turning to the last area, this facility was awarded a C in long-term care, which is an acceptable grade. Long-term care ratings are critical for prospective residents needing personal care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 91.30435 percent of its residents. This is a few points less than we expected but still a decent figure. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.