Hearthstone Nursing & Rehabilitation

While we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it an A for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall score. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. It is typically best to avoid facilities that have a long list of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This facility's second highest category was long-term care, but it nevertheless earned a grade of just D in that category. This is still a well below average grade. Facilities that don't fare well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 80.10471 percent of its patients. This is significantly lower than average. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. We looked at the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our score in this category. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home received a poor grade of F in that area. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.