Saxony Health Center

Saxony Health Center is a small nursing home in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. Sporting an overall rating of B-, this is likely a solid facility. You could definitely do worse than this facility. The best part of this nursing home's profile was its remarkable inspection grade. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that category, with an A+. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed favorably in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Few facilities fared better in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.481865 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses are with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, while this place didn't rank well in terms of nursing hours, it fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than average.

The last area we assessed is short-term care. It received a lowly F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is certainly a significant concern. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area, with just 23.7 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.