Birchwood Care Home

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 a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in that category with a grade of A-. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this facility's more favorable category scores came in the area of short-term care. This wound up being its second best category. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. Our short-term care grades are likely more important for folks requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. Our nursing score features a host of datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility averages just 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is not an impressive total. Finally, while this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of our quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic.

The final area we rated was long-term care, proved to be this facility's weakest category. We gave this facility a D in that category. Nursing homes that do not score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit worried that this nursing home administered the vaccine to a relatively low 82.90598 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.