The Neighborhoods at Brookview

With an address in Brookings, South Dakota, The Neighborhoods at Brookview is one of just a couple available nursing homes in the city. With an overall rating of B-, this is likely a solid nursing home. Based on our assessment, this facility looks like a good fit for most people. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's profile is its stellar inspection score, which we will address in the next section.

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that category, with an A+. This is a much better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.97 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this facility an impressive grade of D. In calculating our nursing grades, we factor in both staffing levels and the training levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 1.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its below average nursing hours, this place received suboptimal scores in some of the quality-based measures we considered in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that more of this nursing home's patients suffered falls which led to major injury. We would argue that many falls could likely be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this facility receiving a terrible nursing rating.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this area. Naturally, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. In computing our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 34.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.