Hearthstone Place

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially would like to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this area. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor dings aren't something to panic about.

In addition, this nursing home also received favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B+. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is typically a solid assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that category, with a score of B. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.159096 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we graded was nursing. We gave this facility a solid score in that area, with a grade of B-. While this is not as dominant as some of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless not a terrible score. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home averages just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also baked a few quality measures into our nursing ratings. This nursing home was relatively weak in two of the major metrics we look at, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are usually good measures of the quality of nursing care available.