The Pines at Philadelphia

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in our shot-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our short-term care ratings are presumably more meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 5.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility 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 nursing home 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 typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home has earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The next category we rated is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a better than average long-term care grade in our assessment, with a C. While this was not quite as strong as some of its other scores, this is still a decent score in this area. In computing our long-term care ratings, we size up the personal care received by a facility's patients. One of the data points we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. It does not appear that this nursing home provided vaccination data. Lastly, this nursing home excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.