Brier Oak on Sunset

Even though we didn't rate this facility well overall, we want to acknowledge it received a decent grade of B- in nursing. The nursing grade features a number of subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

We also wanted to point out this nursing home's decent health inspections in recent years. We gave it somewhat respectable grade of C in this category. Our inspection scores account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This tells you that it dodged the more ominous classes of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

This nursing home's third best category was long-term care. We gave it a C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Long-term care grades are based on the nursing home's amount of nursing services. This includes a vast scope of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than the average nursing home. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.05 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we graded is short-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. Our short-term care grades are presumably more important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its grade in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility is well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.