Freedom Plaza Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. This nursing home excelled at the highest level in two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility supplied about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical facility. 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 Arizona in this area with 76 percent of its residents returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Nursing ratings are largely tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 6 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of care, this place also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. For example, in terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls resulting in serious injury, this place performed as well as any nursing home the state. Avoiding serious falls is generally an indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are employed.

Racking up another strong category grade, this facility also excelled in inspections, where it received an impressive grade of A. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Our inspection scores are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

The next area we graded was long-term care, where this facility received a B. Although this wound up being its poorest category grade, this is still a good grade. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the impressive nursing hours and other staffing provided by this nursing home, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.