Fox Subacute at South Philadelphia

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A+. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's next most favorable category was its long-term care score, where it received a grade of C. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After we finished looking at the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated only 84.23913 percent of its residents against pneumonia. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to the area of short-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in that category. With our short-term care rating, we attempt to forge a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home's weakest category is nursing, which is the last area we scored. For this area, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Unfortunately, this place also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than twice the national average in this datapoint.