Pennsylvania Soldiers and Sailors Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. The nursing score includes quite a few datapoints, many of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident even once per day.

Among its many dominant scores, this nursing home was awarded an excellent long-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also was awarded a superb short-term care score, with a score of A. In computing our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Finally, this facility also received excellent inspection reports in recent years. We gave it one of our best scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Few other nursing homes earned an A- or better in every single category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home 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.