Village at Penn State

On top of being a top notch nursing home overall, it also excelled in inspections, where it earned an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its dominant accomplishments in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for its long-term care grade. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 94.73684 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also received an impressive short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Short-term care grades are often used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The final area we scored was nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home an above average grade of B. Our nursing score is primarily tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.