Heartwood Avenue Healthcare

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it earned a very impressive long-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the senior population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our stronger scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. In computing our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is often a fair assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In our final category, this nursing home also was awarded an impressive nursing rating, with a B+. This rounded out a very strong report card. Our nursing score weighs many components, most of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.