Heritage Care Center

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

Surprisingly, we gave this nursing home a C for its long-term care rating, which is not too bad of a score. For patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 91.89189 percent of its residents, which is a few points less than we anticipated. Fortunately, this place was 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.

Moving on to the category of short-term care, this facility was given just a D in that area. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Considering its grade in this area, we were not stunned to discover that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final area we looked at is nursing, in which this nursing home received a very poor score here as well. We gave it a lowly F for this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. We assessed the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.