Heritage Hall Front Royal

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being quite insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given high marks in the area of long-term care as well. In fact, it received one of our most dominant grades in that area with a score of A-. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are well cared for. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. The nursing grade weighs quite a few components, but the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Lastly, nursing grades also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

The final category we scored is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a C. This actually ended up being this facility's worst category. This is nevertheless not a bad grade. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.