Frankfort Terrace Nursing Center

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in that category with an A. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the road score in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective 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 considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its short-term care rating, which is not one of our better scores. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Given its grade in this area, we weren't stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.

Turning to our final area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in nursing. This was the facility's weakest category rating. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This place offered a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is an alarmingly low total. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.