Briarcliffe Manor

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection grades are based on many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, it does not look like we have deficiency data for this nursing home. Without the information regarding deficiencies for this facility, it was difficult to grade the place in the area of inspections.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Our nursing rating is based on quite a few datapoints, however, the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this nursing home also received favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a grade of B+. In forming these short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 4.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The final area we looked at was long-term care. This facility was awarded a strong nursing grade this year, with a grade of B. While this wasn't nearly as strong as many of its other scores, this remains one of the more impressive grades for this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.