Heritage at Turner Park Health & Rehab

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facilities second best area is short-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the road score in this category. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most critical for those needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below average.

We also gave this facility a middle of the road score in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a C. In computing our long-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's personal care services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. This facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility was awarded an acceptable nursing grade of C. Our nursing score includes many factors, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below the national average. Lastly, nursing grades also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.