Heartland Health Care Center-Briarwood

Heartland Health Care Center-Briarwood is an average-sized non-profit nursing home in Flint, Michigan. This turns out to be a highly rated facility, with an overall grade of B+. As a matter of fact, this turned out to be better than most of the facilities in Flint. This place's strong report card was highlighted by its short-term care grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We gave them an A+ in this area. With our short-term care category, we strive to craft a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Remarkably, this place provides roughly 50% more hours of services from registered nurses and physical therapists than most facilities we assessed. This is usually an encouraging sign. The last item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Michigan in this area with 70.6 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing score is primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This place boasts a really impressive 4.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day, of which a significant percentage was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. In addition to offering high levels of nursing care, this facility was also above average in each of the major quality measures we looked at in this category. By way of illustration, it performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These datapoints are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility offers.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

The next category we graded is long-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive category. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is certainly somewhat concerning. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. After assessing nursing hours provided by this nursing home, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. Due to its grade in this category, it is surprising to find that this facility performed reasonably well both of these statistics. Indeed, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which appears to be higher than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.75 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.