Paul's Run

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, this is this nursing home's second most impressive category score. In that area, this facility received a score of A. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The third category we analyzed was long-term care. This facility was given an impressive long-term care grade, with a B+ in the category. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 62.464985 percent of its residents, which is slightly less than we were hoping for. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, at least this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Switching gears to our next area, this nursing home also performed well in the nursing category. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ for this category. This topped off a very strong report card. Our nursing score consists of a handful of components, however, the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 place 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 by having a protocol of moving patients even once per day.