Heritage Care Center

Although this facility's overall score was as bad as it gets, it actually performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility wound up receiving a a terrible grade in our short-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this category. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we learned that this nursing home offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Another issue is the F this nursing home was given in the area of long-term care. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category likely don't provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities provide. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated 76.62921 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a few points below what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The next category we graded was nursing, where this facility received a very poor score in this category also. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this area, which is obviously somewhat alarming. Nursing ratings are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This facility offered just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This statistic is well below the national average. This place also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its low nursing hours. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this metric. This is quite concerning when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a poor nursing grade.