Heartland Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In this area, we awarded this facility an A. When computing our nursing scores, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor dings are not the end of the world.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B+. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is often a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Switching gears to the next area, this facility was given an acceptable long-term care score. While this is not as impressive as a few of its other category grades, this is truly not a bad grade. In calculating these long-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's personal care services. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.