Greenbriar at the Altamont Skilled Nursing Facility

To pair with its favorable overall score, we awarded this place an A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this nursing home's other achievements is its high-end long-term care grade. It received one of our strongest grades in that category, with a score of A-. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 58.940395 percent of its patients, which is slightly less than we anticipated. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing grade analyzes several subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 having a system of moving a resident even once per day.

Moving on to our fourth category, this nursing home received an acceptable short-term care grade. Although this was not quite as dominant as many of its other category grades, this is truly not a bad grade. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. It doesn't look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.