Fox Subacute at Mechanicsburg

With an address in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Fox Subacute at Mechanicsburg is one of four facilities in this city. Featuring an overall grade of F, we consider this to be a very poor facility. Mechanicsburg received a more impressive city grade of B, so there are far better options in the city worth considering. We would not blame you if you are ready to stop reading and find another nursing home. However, if you want to learn more about this place's category grades, inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a C for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. This nursing home had 6 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

We were also stunned to discover that this nursing home received a somewhat respectable short-term care rating this year. We awarded it a C in that area. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. This place is above the national average in terms of its volume of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this is below average.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. The nursing category is based on many factors, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. Despite its poor nursing grade, this facility provided an average of 5.5 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Roughly one quarter of this care came from registered nurses, which are highly trained nurses. Both of these figures are higher than average, so clearly quantity of care was not its problem. Despite being above average in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a very poor nursing grade.

The next category we scored is long-term care. This nursing home was given a very poor grade of F in that category. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.4382 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this facility also wasn't as bad as we expected at keeping its patients out of the hospital. While it had 5.41 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score wasn't bad since it had more complicated patients.