Heart of Georgia Nursing Home

In addition to earning a great overall rating, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is associated with the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best grades. Inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional quality feature for this nursing home is that it was awarded an impressive long-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. In calculating our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Finally, although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this statistic.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, which was this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in that category. Sadly, this category pulled down the facility's overall profile to some degree. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. It looks like this facility was below average in several staffing metrics we assessed. The facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.