Adams Heritage

We also wanted to emphasize that this facility earned near flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we rated this facility so highly is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as dominant as it gets in this category. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we look at the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Indiana in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning residents even once per day.

The next category we rated is short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B. Believe it or not, this ended up being this facility's least impressive category. A nursing home is doing something right when their lowest grade still beats out most other nursing homes. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 4.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.