Complete Care at Heritage

While this facility received a decent overall rating, its inspections grade is notably more impressive than its overall grade. Due to a strong inspection report this year, it received one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was awarded positive long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive scores in this area, with a grade of B. This proved to be the facility's second best score. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 90.81632 percent of its patients against pneumonia. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next most favorable category we gave this nursing home in any category came in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a C. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is considered to be a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The real question is whether this also impacted quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

The next category we rated is nursing. We awarded this facility a C in that category. The nursing score assesses quite a few subcategories, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, our nursing ratings also consider some quality-focused measures. We look at the percentage of residents who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care can reduce these problems.