Heather Knoll Retirement Village

We want to point out that this facility really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in that category with a grade of A+. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor dings aren't something to panic about.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the category of short-term care. This ended up being its second most favorable category. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. Short-term care ratings are important for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it fared well in this metric with 56 percent of its patients returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

We also awarded this facility a middle of the road grade in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's assistance with daily living instead of the highly skilled therapy and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we looked at is nursing, was this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave this facility a grade of D in this area. This really was one of the few dings on a quality report card. We analyzed the levels of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in computing our rating in this area. With only 3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. In addition to its weak nursing hours, this facility also earned suboptimal scores in many of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We found that a higher percentage of this nursing home's residents sustained falls leading to serious injury.