Heritage Hall North

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to its strong accomplishments in other areas, we gave this facility a grade of A for our short-term care rating. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Another impressive feature of this facility is its inspection grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Inspection scores are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The last category we graded is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B. Believe it or not, this ended up being this facility's weakest category. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's worst grade still beats out most facilities. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.10145 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.