Complete Care at Lehigh

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A-. We assessed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient more often.

Moving on our next area, this facility received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, it received a grade of A- in this area. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.855225 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category we graded, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home finished off a very impressive profile. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most meaningful for residents needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.