Fox Subacute at Mechanicsburg

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with a list of deficiencies flagged. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home's next most favorable category was short-term care. We gave it a C in this area. This is essentially a slightly below average score in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Sadly, this facility's third best score was long-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still performed somewhat poorly. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we assessed was nursing, is this nursing home's worst area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. There are numerous data points within this category. Most of the subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular facility offered a meager 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is well below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.