Pennknoll Village

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a C for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to resident safety. This nursing home was assessed 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were in categories G through L. This means this facility avoided the more ominous categories of deficiencies. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of D. There are numerous datapoints within this category. Many of the datapoints relate to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Unfortunately, this facility only earned a D for its short-term care score, which is well below average in this category. Our short-term care scores are arguably most important for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. With its poor score in this category, we weren't surprised to find this nursing home provides substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this facility's short-term care grade.

The final category we looked at was long-term care. It received an F for this category, which is a poor grade. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.922005 percent of its residents. This is slightly lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.