Heritage Care and Rehabilitation Center

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Our inspection grades weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically have very few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an B-. We looked at the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this area. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a D for its short-term care score, which is not an impressive grade. In our short-term care assessment, we attempt to craft a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Not surprisingly, we discovered that this place provides significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical nursing home. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last area we scored was long-term care, which ended up being this facility's least impressive area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility gave the vaccine to 95.77465 percent of its patients, which is a very solid total. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.