Heartland of Kettering

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best grades in that category with an A-. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second most favorable category is short-term care. We gave it a B- in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is typically a reliable assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. There are many datapoints within this grade. Many of these subcategories reflect nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The final category we graded is long-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive area. It received an F for this area, which is certainly a major concern. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care likely don't provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other nursing homes offer. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 85.97122 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit less than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.