Heritage Hall Dillwyn

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that category with an A. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility also was awarded a positive score in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home an above average grade of B in that area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The final category we assessed is short-term care, which is this facility's worst area. We gave this nursing home a D in this category. Of course, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. In our short-term care score, we try to create a sound measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, we learned that this nursing home offered less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.