Sterling Care at Frostburg Village

To pair with its decent overall score, we awarded this facility an A- for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection scores are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the amount of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 98.31933 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we looked at is short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a C in this area. In computing these short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The last area we looked at is nursing, which ended up being this facility's weakest category. It received a lowly F in this category, which is certainly a major concern. The nursing rating assesses quite a few components, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. In addition to its weak nursing hour totals, this nursing home also received suboptimal marks in many of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We found that more of this facility's patients sustained falls leading to major injury.