Complete Care at Heritage

This facility received a long-term care rating which is better than its overall grade. We awarded this facility a B in this category. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 87.974686 percent of its residents. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

It should also be noted that this facility's inspection score was strong as well. We awarded it a grade of B for inspections, which is one of our better grades. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

The third area we analyzed is short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. With our short-term care assessment, we try to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. The last statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

Switching gears to the last category, this nursing home received a C in nursing, which is a respectable score. Our nursing rating features a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this area. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident more often.