Heartland Care and Rehabilitation Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid facilities that had a long list of severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through 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 safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home was awarded its next best category grade in the area of long-term care. We gave this facility a grade of C in this category, which is a decent score. Our long-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility gave the vaccine to just 83.81295 percent of its residents. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Sadly, this nursing home only earned a D for its short-term care grade, which is well below average in this category. In crafting our short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. With a score of this caliber for this area, we weren't surprised to discover that this nursing home was well below average in the two key staffing metrics we assess. The facility offered substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below average.

The last category we looked at was nursing. This nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with patients, in determining our score in this category. This place offered only 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing scores. This facility performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.