Loyalhanna Care Center: Repeat Violations Ignored by QA - PA
Loyalhanna Care Center, a nursing home at 535 McFarland Road in Latrobe, was cited during the 2025 survey for failing to provide oxygen therapy as ordered by physicians, failing to properly account for controlled medications, failing to correctly label and store drugs, and failing to maintain adequate infection control practices. None of those findings were new. Each had been cited during the survey ending April 11, 2024. Each had generated a plan of correction. Each plan said the same thing: audits would be completed, and the results would go to the quality assurance and performance improvement committee for review.
The committee reviewed them. The violations continued anyway.
Federal inspectors documented that the facility's QAPI committee, the internal body responsible for catching and correcting exactly this kind of recurring failure, was ineffective across all four areas. That word, ineffective, appears in the inspection record four times, once for each deficiency category. It is not a word inspectors use loosely.
The oxygen therapy failure is among the more direct of the four. A physician orders supplemental oxygen for a resident because that resident's body needs it. The order exists in writing. The question inspectors are asking is simply whether staff followed it. In 2024, the answer was no. In 2025, the answer was still no. The facility's own corrective plan had not changed that.
Controlled medication accountability is a different kind of failure, with different stakes. Controlled substances, drugs with recognized potential for abuse or diversion, are supposed to be tracked with a precision that ordinary medications are not. Every dose given, every dose wasted, every count at shift change is part of a paper trail designed to ensure that what leaves the pharmacy ends up where it was supposed to go. The 2024 inspection found that trail was unreliable at Loyalhanna. The 2025 inspection found it still was.
The drug labeling and storage citation covers the physical handling of medications before they reach a resident. Drugs stored incorrectly, labeled incorrectly, or kept past their expiration dates create conditions where the wrong medication or a degraded one can reach a patient. The facility was told in 2024 that its practices in this area were deficient. It developed a plan. Inspectors returned and found the plan had not produced compliance.
Infection control is the broadest of the four categories, and in a nursing home population, failures there carry real weight. Residents in long-term care are often older, immunocompromised, or recovering from illness or surgery. The practices that prevent the spread of infection, hand hygiene, equipment handling, isolation protocols, are not optional safeguards. They are what stands between a manageable situation and an outbreak. Loyalhanna was cited for infection control failures in 2024. Its QAPI committee was told. The 2025 inspection found the deficient practices had not been corrected.
What the inspection record describes, taken together, is not a facility that tried and fell short in one area. It is a facility whose internal quality system failed to produce any meaningful correction across any of the four categories it was specifically tasked with fixing. The audits may have happened. The committee meetings may have happened. The paperwork may have been completed on schedule. None of it worked.
The March 2025 inspection was also cross-referenced to a series of additional deficiency tags covering care planning, physician orders, and clinical care, suggesting the four repeated violations documented here were part of a broader set of findings. The full scope of what inspectors found across those additional citations is not reflected in this portion of the record.
What is reflected is a year's worth of promised improvement that left residents at Loyalhanna Care Center receiving oxygen therapy, medication handling, and infection control practices that federal inspectors found deficient twice in a row.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Loyalhanna Care Center from 2025-03-20 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
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Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: November 3, 2026 · Our methodology
LOYALHANNA CARE CENTER in LATROBE, PA was cited for violations during a health inspection on March 20, 2025.
None of those findings were new.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.