Heritage Place of Decatur

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A-. This is a notably better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to note that this facility received a great long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it one of our most favorable grades in that category with a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home was given a C in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

The next area we graded was nursing, proved to be this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. This really is one of just a few dings in a very solid profile. Nursing ratings are primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing grade significantly.