Quality Life Services - Sarver

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this place especially excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few facilities fared better in that category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. Our nursing rating is primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 place Pennsylvania in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient more often.

We also awarded this facility a respectable score in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. In the category of long-term care, we look at the amount of care provided by a facility, rather than more healthcare-oriented services. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 92.30769 percent of its patients. This is slightly less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we rated was short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that area. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall profile to some degree. Short-term care grades are generally used to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. It looks like this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the staffing figures we looked at. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.2 percent of its residents returning home.