Ephrata Manor

In addition to being an elite nursing home overall, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Very few places performed this well in this category. Inspection scores account for several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many dominant scores, this facility was given a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a score of A in this category. Short-term care grades are generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also would like to point out the fact that this facility was awarded an impressive score of A- in our long-term care area. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 98.53372 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last category, we awarded this facility a grade of A+ for our nursing grade. This completed a first-rate report card. There are a number of factors included in this area. Many of these data points reflect nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning patients even once per day.