Briarwood Healthcare Center

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong short-term care grade. Indeed, this ended up being this nursing home's second strongest category grade. In that area, this facility received a score of A-. Short-term care ratings are vital for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our higher grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we graded was nursing. We gave this facility a solid score in this category, with a B-. While this wasn't as high as a few of this facility's other scores, it is still not a bad grade. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a facility's nurse staffing. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.