Briarfield at Ashley Circle

Briarfield at Ashley Circle is an average-sized nursing home located in Youngstown, Ohio. This nursing home received an overall grade of B-, which is a solid grade. This facility seems to have some things working in its favor. One of the major highlights of this facility's report card is its stellar inspection score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was awarded strong short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive scores in that area, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the facility's second highest score. In determining these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. This place fared as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 56.8 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

The third area we analyzed is long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a solid grade of B-. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid statistic. The last datapoint we assessed is the facility's hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 2.94 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this statistic may be skewed for some facilities based on the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

This nursing home's weakest area is nursing, which is the last area we looked at. We gave it an F for this area. Even with several solid grades in other areas, this score is nevertheless alarming so we wanted to make sure you are aware. The nursing grade is based on a number of data points. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.