Autumn Care of Drexel

Although we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A- for short-term care. This score is far more impressive than its overall grade, which could have been even worse without this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is typically a useful assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of B- in the area. In computing a facility's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

This nursing home's second lowest score is long-term care, where it earned just a D in that category. This is a well below average score. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

In the final category of inspections, this facility had an abysmal showing. Sadly, it received an F in our inspection category. This happens to be our most heavily weighted category in our overall grading system. For places with bad inspection ratings, you should really focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This particular nursing home had 3 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received large government fines recently exceeding $50,000. This usually indicates that government inspectors became frustrated after multiple years of failed health inspections.