Heritage Hall King George

This facility really excelled in long-term care. We awarded it an A- for that category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is frequently a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility's worst area is nursing, which is the final area we looked at. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. Our nursing rating analyzes several data points, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.