Heritage Crossings

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we gave this place an A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor dings are not something to panic about.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning patients even once per day.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care grades this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a score of B+. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.757576 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we rated was short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This proved to be this nursing home's worst category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 3.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.