Penick Village

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of nursing, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving patients even once per day.

Among its many dominant scores, this nursing home received a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspection reports. We gave it an impressive grade of B+ for that category, which is among our highest scores. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The next category we analyzed was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of B. Even though this ended up being its worst category score, this is still an impressive score. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.