Heather Hill Healthcare Center

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that category, with a grade of A-. This is a much better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Nursing grades are largely associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Florida in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient more often.

We also gave this facility a middle of the pack grade in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a C. Our long-term care grades are more meaningful for people in need of more traditional assistance associated with activities of daily living. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 91.408936 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we looked at was short-term care, which was this facility's worst category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Sadly, this grade pulled down the facility's overall profile a bit. Our short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.