Village at Pennwood

Village at Pennwood is a large nursing home located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It looks like this facility is a subpar facility. A grade of this caliber indicates we found some red flags. Fortunately, if you aren't impressed with this facility, there are countless other options available in this city. Lastly, this nursing home's ownership changed in the last year, so we will need to monitor it to confirm it is able to raise its standard of care going forward.

While we were fairly low on this facility overall, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of C. Nursing grades are largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as minimizing major falls. This place performed admirably in this subcategory. Avoiding serious falls is generally an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls can be prevented if a facility offers enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

This nursing home's second lowest category was short-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a well below average score. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most important for residents needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 39.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final category we looked at is long-term care. We gave it an F for this area, which is an abysmal score. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this nursing home vaccinated only 82.41758 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.9 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.