Heartland Health Care Center-Allen Park

Heartland Health Care Center-Allen Park is located in Allen Park, Michigan, a city with a total of 28,200 people. Featuring an overall grade of B+, this facility should work for most prospective patients. This place truly has plenty going for it. This nursing home is stronger in some categories than others, but it did not have any poor grades in any of the major categories discussed below. More information about these categories can be found below.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A+ for its short-term care grade. In the category of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is generally an excellent sign. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Michigan in this area with 68.3 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on its recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings are based on many items found on the a nursing home's inspections. Facilities that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Our nursing rating assesses several subcategories, but the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 3.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is better than the level of care offered by most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The next category we assessed was long-term care, in which this facility was given a B-. This actually proved to be this facility's least impressive category. This is still not a major area of concern. In the area of long-term care, we look at the amount of care offered by a facility, rather than more healthcare-oriented services. On top of offering above average levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This figure is higher than many nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at is the facility's hospitalization rate. Although it had 2.25 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was not too bad.