Friedwald Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also received top notch health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our higher grades in this area, with an A+. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

An additional quality feature for this nursing home is that it received an impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, this turned out to be its second best category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home received its third best category grade in the category of short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of B- in this area, which is an acceptable grade. With our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The final category we rated is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category, which is a rock bottom grade. We would not necessarily disregard a nursing home because of a single bad grade though. There are several criteria included in this category. Many of these criteria are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these data points to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.