Briarwood Community Living Center

On top of performing well in its overall score, this facility received even higher grades in the area of long-term care. It received one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that category, with a score of B+. Short-term care scores are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home earned a B for its inspections score. This is an above average grade in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The final area we analyzed is nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of B. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these data points as good indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.