Briar Hill Rest Home

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections turned out to be its best category. In that area, we awarded it an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we gave it one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a score of B+. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 86.50307 percent of its residents. This is a few points below what we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. There are many factors included in this area. Most of these datapoints relate to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Our next area is short-term care, where we awarded this facility a grade of C in that category. In forming these short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. It does not appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.