Birch View Nursing Center

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with an A. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, it also received a very strong long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded this nursing home a score of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 96.498055 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third best area we awarded this nursing home in any area came in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a C. In computing these short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. We were not able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

Switching gears to our last category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in nursing. This was the facility's worst category rating. Sadly, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Our nursing rating looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. On top of its below average nursing hours, this facility earned poor scores in many of the quality-based metrics we considered in calculating our nursing scores. We found that a higher percentage of this place's residents sustained falls leading to major injury.