Wexford Healthcare Center

Wexford Healthcare Center is a large facility located in Wexford, Pennsylvania. We awarded this nursing home an overall grade of B-. A grade of this caliber requires some solid marks. Based on all of the relevant data, there are certainly much worse nursing homes out there. The best part of this nursing home's profile was its stellar inspection reports. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section.

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Not many facilities fared more favorably in this area. Short-term care grades are generally used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This nursing home provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. This is what we like to find when assessing a facility in this category. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Pennsylvania in this area with 59.1 percent of its patients returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. Our nursing score includes a handful of factors, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is well below average. However, more than one quarter of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. This is a high ratio of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours heavily in computing our scores. Finally, we look at quality-based metrics, such as the percent of residents who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. These datapoints are indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we graded is long-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is an abysmal grade. This is clearly a major disappointment. For residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.94776 percent of its residents, which is an above average figure. To our surprise, this place also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.67 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.