Susquehanna Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

Although we gave this nursing home a horrible overall score, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's next most respectable category was short-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D in that area. This ended up being a relatively poor grade. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. With a grade in this range in this category, we were not shocked to discover this nursing home was below average in several staffing areas we assess. The facility offered substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Another unfortunate development was the F this nursing home received in the category of long-term care. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the nursing home didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 88.78143 percent of its residents. This is quite a bit below what we expected. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility didn't perform very well in this category either. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is just about as as uninspiring as it gets. Our nursing score includes a handful of subcategories, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing score significantly.