Heritage Hall-Rich Creek

This facility received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially want to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government 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.

Among the reasons we rated this nursing home so well is that it received a very impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care is its second most impressive category score. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.982185 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing score weighs a handful of factors, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below average. Finally, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The final area we graded is short-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a poor score. You shouldn't simply rule out a facility because of a single poor grade though. Our short-term care scores are probably most meaningful for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home provides fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.4 percent of its patients returning home.