Briarcrest Nursing Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our nursing rating. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This nursing home's second best category was short-term care, but even there it received just a D in that category. This still happens to be a relatively poor score. In the category of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Considering its poor rating in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this place offers substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.2 percent of its residents returning home.

Unfortunately, this facility received very poor government inspection reports in recent years, causing them to receive a lowly F in our inspection category. An F in this category is generally a signal that there were red flags on the facility's inspection reports. You should pay special attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection rating. We would scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed one category G through L deficiency, which are among the more serious deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies found by the government inspectors had the potential to pose actual harm to residents. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this facility received large government fines recently totaling more than $100,000. This typically signifies that a facility's poor performance spanned multiple years.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home did not fare well in this category either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as as uninspiring as it gets. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.