Liberty Health Care Center

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection grades are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. You should especially avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This facility's next highest area turned out to be its long-term care grade, where it received a grade of C. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 97.35683 percent of its patients. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care rating. This is well below average in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is more often than not a useful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a grade of this caliber in this category, we were not shocked to discover that this facility was below average in the two key staffing metrics we looked at. The nursing home provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

Switching gears to the final category, this nursing home really did not fare very well here either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. When calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. On top of receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this nursing home was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found this place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this nursing home's nursing score significantly.