Birchwood Nursing and Rehabilitation

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. 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.

This facility also excelled in the area of long-term care, with an impressive score of A- in this category. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 95.15152 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. The last statistic we looked at was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 2.34 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade substantially.

This facility's worst area is short-term care, which is the last category we scored. For this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D. Short-term care grades are commonly used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. It appears that this nursing home was below average in two of the key staffing metrics we looked at. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.