Briarfield at Ashley Circle

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Adding to this facility's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of B- in this category. Our nursing grade is based on a host of datapoints. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients more often.

Sadly, this nursing home's next highest category is long-term care. However, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed somewhat badly. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 96.9163 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, which is this nursing home's least impressive area. Sadly, it received an F for this area, which is clearly very disappointing. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.