Highland Hills Post Acute: Abuse Investigation Failures - PA
On September 24, 2025, at 1:00 in the afternoon, the Director of Nursing confirmed to inspectors that the facility had failed to carry out complete and thorough investigations into two separate allegations of abuse. Two residents, identified in inspection records as Resident R1 and Resident R3, were involved. A third resident had also been flagged, but inspectors found the investigation failures applied specifically to those two.
The confirmation came from the top of the nursing chain of command. Not from a floor aide, not from a charge nurse pulled aside in a hallway. The Director of Nursing sat down with inspectors and acknowledged that the written policies and procedures the facility was supposed to follow, the ones designed to ensure that abuse allegations get a real look, had not been implemented.
That word, implemented, carries weight. It does not mean the policies did not exist on paper somewhere. It means that when allegations arose involving R1 and R3, the machinery those policies were supposed to set in motion did not run.
What the allegations themselves involved, the nature of what R1 and R3 reported or what was reported on their behalf, is not detailed in the inspection record. The report identifies the violation and the residents affected. It does not describe what the abuse allegations alleged. That absence is its own kind of fact. The investigation was incomplete. What inspectors were able to determine is that it was incomplete. What they were not able to determine, because the investigation was incomplete, is everything else.
Inspectors classified the level of harm as minimal harm or potential for actual harm. That classification sits at the lower end of the federal harm scale, but it describes a situation where something bad could have happened or did happen in a limited way, not a situation where nothing was at risk. Two people who lived at Highland Hills Post Acute raised, or had raised on their behalf, allegations serious enough to trigger the facility's abuse investigation requirements. Those requirements were not met.
Highland Hills Post Acute is a post-acute care facility, meaning it serves residents who are often recovering from hospitalizations, surgeries, or medical events serious enough to have landed them in a hospital first. These are not people who arrived healthy. Many are elderly, many have conditions that affect their ability to communicate clearly or advocate for themselves, and many depend entirely on the staff around them to recognize when something is wrong and respond to it.
The federal and state citations attached to this deficiency reach across multiple layers of oversight. Pennsylvania's Department of Health cited the facility under state code provisions covering licensee responsibility, management obligations, and nursing services. The nursing services citation, under 28 Pa. Code 211.12(d)(1)(5), addresses the duties of nursing staff in protecting residents. The management citation, under 28 Pa. Code 201.18(b)(1)(e)(1), reaches up to the people running the building. The licensee responsibility citation, under 28 Pa. Code 201.14(a), reaches further still, to whoever holds the license to operate.
That stack of citations reflects something real about how abuse investigation failures work. They are not purely a floor-level problem. When a facility fails to investigate abuse allegations completely, the failure runs through every level that was supposed to catch it and didn't. The aide who should have been interviewed. The supervisor who should have assigned someone to do the interviewing. The administrator who should have confirmed it happened. The Director of Nursing who, on September 24, confirmed to inspectors that it had not.
The inspection was a complaint survey, meaning someone, a resident, a family member, a staff member, or another party, had raised a concern serious enough to bring inspectors to the building. Complaint surveys are triggered. They do not happen on a random schedule. Someone made a call or filed a report, and inspectors arrived at 1105 Perry Highway to find out what was going on.
What they found was a Director of Nursing who did not dispute the deficiency. The confirmation came the day before the survey was formally completed, on September 25, 2025. The facility had been given an opportunity to respond, and the response was an acknowledgment.
The inspection record notes that few residents were affected. In the language of federal nursing home oversight, that means the problem was not facility-wide, not something inspectors found touching resident after resident across every wing and unit. But few is not none. Few is R1. Few is R3. Two people who lived at this facility and whose abuse allegations did not receive the complete and thorough investigation they were owed.
What a complete and thorough investigation looks like, in practice, is not complicated to describe. It means interviewing the resident who made the allegation, or who had the allegation made on their behalf. It means interviewing witnesses. It means interviewing the staff members involved or accused. It means reviewing relevant records. It means documenting all of that in a way that creates a clear picture of what happened, what was found, and what the facility concluded. It means doing this promptly, before memories fade and before anyone with something to hide has time to coordinate a story.
When those steps are skipped or left incomplete, the resident is left with something worse than an unresolved allegation. They are left with a facility that received a serious report about their safety and did not follow through. They continue living there. The staff members who were the subject of the allegation continue working there. Nothing is resolved, because the investigation that would resolve it was never completed.
The Director of Nursing's confirmation on September 24 did not include, at least not in any portion of the inspection record available, an explanation for why the investigations were incomplete. There is no notation of a staffing shortage that week, no reference to a competing emergency that pulled investigators away, no account of what steps were taken and where the process stopped. The record states the failure. It does not explain it.
That is often how these records read. They document what was found. They do not always document why. The why, the sequence of decisions and non-decisions that led to two abuse allegations going without complete investigation, would require more than an inspection report to reconstruct.
What the record does establish is that Highland Hills Post Acute, as of September 25, 2025, had confirmed through its own Director of Nursing that two residents who raised abuse allegations did not have those allegations fully investigated. The facility's plan of correction, the formal response it was required to submit outlining how it would fix the problem, is not reproduced in the available inspection record. The inspection document notes that anyone seeking information about the plan of correction should contact the nursing home or the state survey agency directly.
Resident R1 and Resident R3 are identified in the inspection record by those designations only. Their names are not public. Their ages are not listed. The nature of the abuse they alleged is not described. What is described is that they were among the few residents the facility was supposed to protect through a complete investigation, and that protection did not come.
The building at 1105 Perry Highway continues to operate. The license has not been listed as revoked or suspended in the inspection record. Life inside Highland Hills Post Acute, for the residents still living there, goes on. Whether R1 and R3 are among them, whether anyone has since gone back and completed what was left undone, whether the allegations they raised have ever been fully examined, the inspection record does not say.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Highland Hills Post Acute from 2025-09-25 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.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 12, 2026 · Our methodology
HIGHLAND HILLS POST ACUTE in PITTSBURGH, PA was cited for abuse-related violations during a health inspection on September 25, 2025.
Two residents, identified in inspection records as Resident R1 and Resident R3, were involved.
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.