Brandywine Hall

This nursing home's best category grade came in the category of government inspections. In that category, we awarded this facility a B+. It outperformed most facilities in this area. Inspection scores are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B in that category, which is one of our better scores. Our nursing rating is largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a resident more often.

This nursing home's next highest category was long-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a B-. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this facility vaccinated a relatively low 54.870773 percent of its residents, which is somewhat concerning. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we scored was short-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is an abysmal score. This is certainly a significant disappointment. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Considering its score in this area, we weren't surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.