Heritage Hall Blacksburg

One of the reasons this ended up being a decent facility is that it received a favorable inspection score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this facility's better category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.56803 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's third best category came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a C. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.

This facility's weakest category was nursing, which is the last category we looked at. For this category, we gave this facility a grade of just D. Our nursing score weighs quite a few components, however, the main one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of its weak nursing hours, this nursing home received poor marks in many of the quality-based metrics we considered in calculating our nursing scores. We found that more of this facility's residents sustained falls which led to serious injury. We believe that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this facility receiving a poor nursing grade.