Brownsville Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in this area with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being quite minor. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable grades. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care grade. This is well below average in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services To have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. With a grade of this caliber in this area, we were not shocked to learn this facility was well below average in two of the key staffing figures we looked at. The nursing home provided substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

The last category we scored is nursing, which is this facility's weakest category. We gave it an F for this category, which is certainly very disappointing. In computing our nursing scores, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This place offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is an alarmingly low total. On top of its weak nursing hour totals, this place also received poor marks in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We found that more of this nursing home's residents experienced falls which led to serious injury. We believe that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this facility receiving a poor nursing grade.