Heritage Hall Front Royal

Heritage Hall Front Royal is one of just a couple available nursing homes in Front Royal, Virginia. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of B, which is a very respectable grade. In our view, this facility looks like a good fit for quite a few people. This nursing home's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection grade, which is addressed in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it was awarded a very positive long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a great way to avoid negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also gave this nursing home a middle of the road grade in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a B-. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. This proved to be a stronger area than its staffing metrics. It performed well in this metric with 58.3 percent of its residents returning home. This was a boost to its score in this category.

Turning to our final category, this facility was given a grade of C in nursing, which we consider to be an acceptable grade. In calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provides only 3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.