Pa. Nursing Homes Get F From Watchdog Group

Families For Better Care, a national watchdog group that creates public awareness of nursing home conditions has released its latest report card. Pennsylvania not only gets a failing grade, but is ranked near the bottom of the barrel, at #46 overall.

Here are the key findings:

• Pennsylvania’s tanking nursing home care continued for the third consecutive report card, plunging the state’s ranking 14 spots to No. 46 overall and recording Pennsylvania’s first failing grade in any report.
• Dangerous conditions became more prevalent in Pennsylvania’s nursing homes as severe deficiencies swelled more than 80 percent since the last report card.
• Ninety-five percent of Pennsylvania’s nursing homes were cited one or more deficiencies.
• Pennsylvania’s nursing home residents continued to have a difficult time getting much needed help from caregivers as residents received fewer than 2 hours and 21 minutes of direct care per day.
• Pennsylvania is the MId-Atlantic Region’s lowest ranked state and the region’s only state to fail in care overall.

I've written extensively about problems at Gracedale, but Cedarbrook is now slipping, too.It had been rated as a five-star (much above average) by The Center for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS), but that has now fallen to four stars.

A Department of Health inspection dated 1/31/19 resulted in eight citations directly related to resident care.

The most serious of these was a failure to provide and implement an infection prevention and control program (details in report).