Heritage Hall Nursing Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively minor. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing scores are primarily associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the next category, this facility also received a score of B for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 78.125 percent of its patients, which is a few points lower than we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we rated is short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This turned out to be this facility's worst area. Short-term care grades are often employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.