Brookside Skilled Nursing Hospital

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an impressive grade of A. Few facilities fared better in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is considered to be a meaningful assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing rating is mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this nursing home received an impressive grade of A- in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 95.7672 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another impressive feature for this nursing home is its inspection rating. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-, wrapping up its straight A performance. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.