ProMedica Skilled Nursing And Rehabilitation (Pottstown)

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our inspection scores account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's second best area was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this area. Long-term care grades are used to assess a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 66.42857 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is quite a few points lower than what we were hoping for. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's second least favorable score is short-term care, where it received just a D in that area. This is a relatively poor grade. Short-term care grades are often employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Given its grade in this category, we were not stunned to find that this place was well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The next category we graded is nursing, which ended up being this facility's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this area. The nursing score weighs several subcategories, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to its subpar nursing hour totals, this place also earned poor scores in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We found that more of this facility's patients suffered falls which led to serious injury. We believe that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this place receiving a poor nursing rating.