Penn Mar Therapeutic Center

In addition to performing well in its overall score, this facility earned even higher grades in nursing. In fact, we gave it one of our highest scores in this category with an A. The nursing rating consists of many subcategories, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. We gave it an A for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The final category we rated is long-term care. This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care score in our assessment, with a grade of B-. While this wasn't as elite as several of its other category grades, this is still an acceptable score for that category. Long-term care grades are commonly used to judge a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 5.797101 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.