Hegg Memorial Health Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned top notch inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this facility an B. Nursing grades are mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of long-term care, where it was given a score of B. It outpaced most facilities in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 95.96413 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to the last category, this facility received a B- for short-term care, which is generally a respectable rating. In computing these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.