Autumn Lake Healthcare at Birch Manor

Neither this nursing home's overall score nor its category scores gave us anything to write home about. This place's best category is nursing, but even there it received just a D. This is still a subpar grade. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with residents, in computing our score in this area. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is slightly below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility's second most respectable category is long-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D in that category. This is still a well below average grade. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 91.5625 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

Sadly, this facility received a grade of just D in our inspection category. This is well below average grade. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. This particular nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 3 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a very poor grade in this area also. It received an abysmal F for this category, which is obviously a major concern. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most important for individuals requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Considering its score in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.9 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.