Greenbrier Nursing & Rehabilitation Center of Pale

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B. It actually performed better than most nursing homes in this area. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing score. We gave this facility an impressive grade of D. When computing a facility's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses are with patients as well as the skill levels of the nurses. 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 looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we scored was short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive area. We gave this facility a D in this area. Our short-term care grades are critical for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Considering its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. The last item we considered in this area is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.