The Most Common Violations in Lehigh Valley Personal Care Homes

How we counted

For each of the 70 personal care homes and assisted living residences DHS lists in the three counties, our fetch scripts read the most recent Licensing Inspection Summaries and recorded which sections of 55 Pa. Code were cited. 68 homes had a report we could read; for each, we counted the sections in the latest one.

Each section counts once per home, so a home cited twice under the same section counts once. The table shows how many homes had each section cited at their latest inspection.

The top ten

Most of the list is the routine machinery of running a home safely: storing food correctly, running and documenting fire drills, keeping accurate medication records, storing medications properly, and tracking each worker's annual training hours.

Food and sanitation

Food storage citations usually involve unlabeled or undated leftovers, items stored at the wrong temperature, or food kept past its date. Sanitation citations follow similar patterns. They rarely reflect harm, but a home with repeated kitchen citations is telling you something about attention to detail.

On a tour, ask to see the kitchen. A clean, organized kitchen with dated containers is easy to show off.

Fire drills and exits

Pennsylvania requires regular unannounced fire drills, including during sleeping hours, and requires that residents can be evacuated within a set time. Evacuation and unobstructed-exit citations often come from a missed or poorly documented drill, or from items left in a hallway.

These matter more than they sound. Ask how residents who use walkers or wheelchairs are moved at night and how many staff are on duty then.

Medications

Medication sections, covering records, storage and administration training, together make up the largest share of citations. Errors on a medication record can mean a dose was given and not recorded, or recorded and not given. Storage citations often involve expired or unlabeled medications.

Ask who administers medications, whether they have completed DHS's medication administration course, and how the home audits its records. One medication citation is common; the same one at consecutive inspections is a pattern.

Training and records

Annual training and training record citations usually mean documentation could not show that each direct care worker completed the required 12 hours a year. Record confidentiality and resident record citations are similar paperwork findings.

They are rarely dangerous in themselves, but homes that struggle to document training often struggle to retain staff, which affects residents directly.

How the Lehigh Valley compares with what DHS reports statewide

DHS does not publish a ranked list of citations for each region, but its training materials and annual licensing presentations describe the same pattern statewide: medication administration and records, fire safety and staff training are perennial leaders. The Lehigh Valley's latest reports fit that pattern closely.

That consistency is useful. It means the questions in this guide apply to almost any home you tour, from a small Slate Belt home to a large Allentown campus.

Turning citations into tour questions

Before a tour, open the home's page in our directory and note the sections cited in the last two reports. Then ask about each one: what happened, what changed, and how the home checks that the fix has held. A confident administrator will answer without defensiveness and may show you the updated log or checklist.

If a home has no recent citations, ask what its internal audits look like. Good homes find their own problems before inspectors do.

Why counts differ between homes

Two homes of the same size can show very different citation counts for reasons beyond quality: one inspection may have reviewed more resident records, a complaint visit may have focused on a single issue, and a new administrator may still be catching up on paperwork left by a predecessor.

That is why patterns across several reports tell you more than any single number. Our facility pages show up to four recent reports side by side so you can see the trend.

Which citations should worry you most

Citations involving supervision, resident injuries, abuse or neglect reporting, incident reports, resident rights or a provisional license deserve direct questions and a careful look at the plan of correction. So do repeated citations of the same medication section.

Our facility pages list each home's cited sections for up to four recent reports and link the PDFs, so you can see exactly what was found.