Heritage Convalescent Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

We also awarded this nursing home a strong grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a B in this category, which happens to be one of our higher grades. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished assessing the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing rating is largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient at least once a day.

This facility's least impressive area was short-term care, which is the final area we scored. For this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We found that this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.