Freeburg Care Center

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this nursing home a favorable score in long-term care. This nursing home earned a grade of B in this area, which turns out to be one of our more impressive grades. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.69041 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. Our nursing rating includes a host of datapoints. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. 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. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The last category we assessed is short-term care, which is this nursing home's weakest area. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is clearly a major concern. In crafting these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With a grade of this caliber for this area, we weren't surprised to learn this facility was below average in multiple staffing figures we looked at. The facility provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.9 percent of its residents returning home.