Heritage Hall-Rich Creek

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home also received first-rate health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in this area, with a grade of A+. Inspection scores are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so well is that it was given a strong long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care is its second most impressive category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.74359 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a facility's 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. Lastly, our nursing grades also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

This nursing home's least impressive area is short-term care, which is the final category we analyzed. Sadly, it received an F for this category. In spite of several excellent scores in other categories, this score is still somewhat alarming so we wanted to make a note of it. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.1 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below the national average.