Frankfort Healthcare & Rehab Center

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The second highest area we gave this nursing home in any category came in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. In determining these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. Nursing ratings are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is significantly below the national average. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The next area we rated was long-term care. It received a lowly F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is obviously a significant disappointment. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. We were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 89.47369 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is significantly less than the national average. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.