Pennsburg Manor

In addition to faring well overall, this facility also received nearly flawless government inspections. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that area with an A+. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we were not able to find deficiency data for this facility. We would like to have more data for this facility. Without having access to the deficiency related data, it was difficult to grade it in this category.

Another one of this nursing home's quality category scores came in the category of short-term care. We gave them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a score of B. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is typically a fair assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B. In a long-term care environment, 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. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 89.39394 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last area we rated is nursing, in which this facility was given a B-. Even though this proved to be its weakest category grade, this is still not a poor grade. Our nursing score looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, although this facility did not rank well in terms of its nursing hours, it performed better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than average.