Heritage Court Post Acute of Scottsdale

On top of faring well in its overall grade, this facility received even higher grades in our short-term care category. It earned one of our highest scores in that area with an A. With our short-term care category, we seek to create a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

In addition, this nursing home earned top notch inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that area, with an A. Our inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspections. Facilities that excel in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing rating consists of a handful of subcategories, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident even once per day.

The last area we rated is long-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of C. Although this proved to be its lowest category score, this is still not a poor grade. In calculating our long-term care ratings, we size up the personal care offered to the nursing home's patients. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.52941 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.