Hickory House Nursing Home

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this facility has received excellent inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its elite performance in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care rating. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Nursing ratings are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Pennsylvania in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident even once per day.

Turning to our final category, this facility also performed well in our long-term care category. We gave it a B+ in this category. This rounded out a very impressive report card. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.