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. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We were also stunned to learn that this nursing home received a reasonably solid long-term care rating in our assessment. We gave it a C in this area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 68.20277 percent of its patients. This is multiple points below average. Nevertheless, this facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility wound up receiving a a very poor score in our short-term care area. It received a lowly F in this area. Short-term care grades are typically employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services To offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

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. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these data points to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.