Greenbriar Community Care Center

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. A deficiency-free inspection report is what we look for.

This nursing home also was awarded a positive long-term care grade. In fact, we gave them a B in this category, which is one of our better. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. When determining our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident more often.

Turning to the fourth area, we awarded this facility a D in short-term care. This was the facility's worst category rating. Of course, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Our short-term care grade is typically used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.1 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.