Liberty Commons Rehabilitation Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

This nursing home also didn't grade out terribly in the category of short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a B- in that category, which ended up being among its more favorable scores. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its long-term care score. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 96.63866 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Switching gears to our last area, this facility really didn't fare well in this area either. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this is really as bad as it gets. Our nursing rating is largely tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.