Birchwood Care Home

Although this facility's overall score was not a highlight, it received a slightly more favorable grade in the category of inspections. We awarded it a B- for that category, which is not bad. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This nursing home's long-term care grade turns out to be one of its higher scores. The facility was awarded a grade of C in this category. Long-term care ratings are essential for people seeking personal care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 82.68398 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit below what we were hoping for. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. The nursing grade considers numerous factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. With a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This facility performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we looked at is short-term care, ended up being this nursing home's worst area. We gave this facility a D in that area. Our short-term care scores are likely most important for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home offers significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical nursing home. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.