Chandler Hall Health Services

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also received an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

In addition, this facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that area, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing grade includes a number of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Pennsylvania in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a resident at least once a day.

The next category we rated is long-term care. It received an abysmal F in this category, which is a rock bottom grade. We wouldn't necessarily rule out a facility because of one concerning category though. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 38.70968 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a few points less than the national average. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.