Elan Skilled Nursing: Mouse Droppings in Resident Rooms - PA
Mouse droppings.
Then more of them. Around the perimeter of the same room. Behind a reclining chair. Behind another chair in a second room. Inside both closets of a third.
Inspectors spent the morning of November 20, 2025, moving furniture and opening closet doors across two nursing units at the Scranton facility, which operates under the full name Elan Skilled Nursing and Rehab, A Jewish Senior Living community. What they found was consistent and widespread: mouse-like droppings in resident room after resident room, in the spaces where furniture sat flush against walls and where clothing hung above the floor.
The room belonging to Resident 68 had droppings along the entire perimeter.
At 11:44 in the morning, inspectors checked another room and found droppings behind the window-side dresser and the reclining chair beside it.
Seven minutes later, in yet another room, they found more behind the door-side chair and inside both closets.
These were not isolated pellets in a utility corridor or a storage area. They were in the rooms where people sleep, dress, and spend most of their hours.
What made the findings harder to explain was what inspectors found when they pulled the pest control records. The facility had a pest management contractor. Inspectors reviewed that contractor's documentation going back to September 2025, three months of visits and reports leading up to the November survey. Not once in those records did the contractor note any mouse activity, no droppings, no gnaw marks, nothing to suggest a rodent problem existed anywhere in the building.
The droppings behind the furniture told a different story.
Pest control contractors typically document what they find during each visit, and those records become the facility's evidence that the program is working. When a contractor visits a nursing home month after month and records no rodent activity, the expectation is that there is no rodent activity. But inspectors documented droppings in multiple rooms across multiple units, droppings that had accumulated in the kinds of spots that get missed when furniture stays in place and closets go unchecked.
Either the contractor was not looking in the right places, or what was found was not being written down. The inspection report does not resolve which.
The Director of Nursing and the Nursing Home Administrator were both present when inspectors reviewed the findings on November 21 at 11:30 in the morning. The report does not record what either of them said.
CMS cited the facility under F0925, the federal tag covering pest control and the requirement that nursing homes remain free of insects, rodents, and other pests. The level of harm was classified as minimal harm or potential for actual harm, affecting many residents. The citation also referenced Pennsylvania's own management code.
The classification of minimal harm reflects the regulatory framework's judgment about documented injury, not about what it means to live in a room where mice have been moving through the dark spaces behind your furniture. Residents at skilled nursing facilities are, by definition, people who cannot easily leave. Many have limited mobility. Many have compromised immune systems. The droppings found in closets, behind chairs, and along room perimeters were not in a part of the building residents can avoid.
This was a complaint inspection, meaning someone contacted regulators before the survey team arrived. The report does not identify who filed the complaint or what specifically they reported. Inspectors arrived and found what they found.
The pest control records from September, October, and November 2025 showed no rodent activity. The rooms showed otherwise. That gap, three months of clean paperwork against walls lined with droppings, is what the inspection captured on November 21, and what the facility's director of nursing and administrator sat across from inspectors to hear described.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Elan Skilled Nursing and Rehab, A Jewish Senior Li from 2025-11-21 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: August 26, 2026 · Our methodology
ELAN SKILLED NURSING AND REHAB, A JEWISH SENIOR LI in SCRANTON, PA was cited for violations during a health inspection on November 21, 2025.
Around the perimeter of the same room.
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.