Heartland Health Care Center - Grosse Pointe Woods

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our short-term care category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Nursing scores are primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Racking up yet another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a score of A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor dings are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's worst category was long-term care, which is the final category we analyzed. In this area, we awarded this facility an D. We would like to to point out this potential weak link, but you should not over-emphasize a single weak area either. In the category of long-term care, we assess the quantity of services provided by a nursing home, rather than more sophisticated services. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.