Birchwood Nursing and Rehabilitation

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or 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.

We also awarded this facility a score of A for our long-term care grade. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.72611 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. While this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a resident more often.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this facility a D for the area of short-term care, rendering this the facility's worst area. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.