Heritage Hall Blacksburg

While we didn't give this facility a good overall score, we actually awarded it a strong score in the area of long-term care, where it earned a B. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.744896 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Remarkably, this nursing home actually earned a good score in the area of inspections as well. We awarded it a grade of B for that category, which is one of our better grades. Few nursing homes that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We were stunned to find that this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we gave it a score of D for that category, which is one of our best grades. Our nursing category is based on many subcategories, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Turning to our last category, we gave this facility a D for our short-term care category. This was the facility's worst category score. Short-term care scores are meaningful for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With its score in this area, we weren't surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.