Brickyard Healthcare – Brandywine Care Center

Although we gave this nursing home a terrible overall score, we awarded it a B for our inspections rating. This was due to the facility receiving a quality government inspection report this year. Our inspection ratings are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. You should especially avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 11 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home's second best score is short-term care, but even there it received just a D in that category. This still happens to be a well below average score. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this nursing home provides substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received an F for its nursing grade. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last area we looked at is long-term care. We gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is a poor score. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is often a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the nursing home is not as well-staffed. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated just 88.23529 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.