Abramson Senior Care at Lankenau Medical Center

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections are virtually perfect. Our inspection grades weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top-shelf nursing home also excelled in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Only a small group of facilities fared better in this category. In our short-term care category, we strive to create a fair measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Moving on our third category, this nursing home was given a strong long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this area. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it 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.

In the last category we rated, this facility received a very favorable grade of A in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility completed a straight A profile. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.