Heart of Georgia Nursing Home

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not 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.

We also awarded this facility an impressive score in long-term care. This facility earned a grade of B in this area, which turns out to be one of our higher grades. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of C in this area. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a fair measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this nursing home submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next area we assessed was nursing, 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 nursing grade is primarily tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is well below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these data points to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.