Heartland of Marietta

We gave this facility one of our better scores in the area of nursing, with an A-. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Nursing grades are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Ohio in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a patient more frequently.

This facility also was given a strong short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it a B in that area, which happens to be one of our better. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facilities third most favorable area is long-term care. We gave it a C in this category. This is basically a slightly below average score in this category. In determining our long-term care grades, we look at the personal care received by the facility's residents. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to only 90.243904 percent of its patients, which is somewhat concerning. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we assessed was inspections. This nursing home did not receive favorable inspections in recent years. We gave it an F in this category. This dragged down this facility's overall score significantly. With facilities that received this bad of an inspection grade, we would scrutinize the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, we want to point out that this facility was assessed large government fines recently in excess of $50,000. This often suggests that government inspectors became fed up after several years of bad inspections.