Heartland of Riverview

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a score of C. Inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in categories J through L. This tells you that inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to put resident health or safety in immediate harm or jeopardy. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

We gave this nursing home just a D for our short-term care score and that actually ended up being its next most respectable score. Our short-term care grades are thought to be more important for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Despite its poor grade in this category, this nursing home actually excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it provided more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the average facility. Clearly its weaknesses in this department are more of a quality issue. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. It fared better than most nursing homes in this metric with 52.3 percent of its patients returning home. Despite its poor grade in this area, neither skilled nursing staffing nor returning residents home proved to be the problem.

This facility ended up receiving a an abysmal score in our long-term care area. It was given an F in this category. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category likely don't provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities offer. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated 60.97561 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a few points less than the national average. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

The last area we scored was nursing, in which this nursing home was given a very poor grade in this category also. Sadly, it received an F in this category, which is obviously a major concern. Nursing scores are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.