Heartland Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means 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. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home performed well in the category of short-term care. In fact, we gave it a score of A- for that category, which happens to be one of our higher scores. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our last category, we awarded this nursing home a D for our long-term care category. This was the nursing home's weakest category score. Nevertheless, you should not dwell on a single weak area. Nursing homes that don't fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 69 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is quite a few points lower than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.