Gettysburg Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Few facilities performed better in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, we awarded this facility a B+ in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable grades. In the category of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. There are many datapoints included in this category. Most of these factors are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

The last area we analyzed was long-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is clearly a major disappointment. Long-term care grades in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 93.57542 percent of its patients. This is somewhat below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.