Liberty Heights

On top of being a great facility overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections were virtually perfect. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, it does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we rated this nursing home so favorably is that it received an A+ short-term care score. This is simply as elite as it gets in this area. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. The nursing score assesses a handful of components, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In our last category, this nursing home also was given an excellent long-term care score, with a B+. This completed a very impressive report card. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.