Briarwood Village

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades was in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is typically used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned an A+ nursing score. When calculating our nursing scores, we weigh both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

The last area we rated is long-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. Naturally, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to a relatively low 74.66216 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.