Paramount Senior Living at Peters Township

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we assessed this facility so highly is that it received an A+ short-term care score. This is flat out as strong as it gets in this category. With our short-term care grade, we try to craft a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility also was awarded a impressive long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be this nursing home's third most impressive category grade. In that category, this facility received a grade of A. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our last area, this facility also received a first-rate nursing score, with an A. This rounded out a first-rate report card. The nursing grade assesses quite a few factors, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.