Pennypack Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a great nursing home overall, it also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly flawless. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its impressive assessments in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a score of A for our long-term care rating. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but there's nothing wrong with a score in this range either. We analyzed the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our rating in this category. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The final area we assessed is short-term care. We gave this facility a solid grade in that category, with a B-. Even though this is not as favorable as some of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless nothing to be ashamed of. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.