Briarwood Post Acute

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. Our nursing score includes several factors, however, the primary consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Incredibly, we awarded this nursing home a C for our short-term care rating, which really isn't a bad grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is generally a solid measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

This facility's second least favorable category was long-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that category. This is a well below average score. For prospective patients seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.10714 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. We would advise paying close attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was assessed 9 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed large government fines recently of more than $50,000. This generally means that inspectors grew tired after multiple years of bad government inspections.