Care One at Brookline

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a resident more often.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

We also want to point out the fact that this nursing home was given an impressive score of A in our short-term care area. In our short-term care score, we strive to create a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last category we looked at proved to be this facility's worst category. However, even its weakest link would likely be a highlight for most facilities. We gave it a favorable grade of B in long-term care. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 85.11628 percent of its patients. This is a few points lower than we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.