Heritage Hall West

In addition to having a decent overall grade, we also want to point out that this place received favorable government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with a B+. This is a notably better grade than the nursing home's overall score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 74.74227 percent of its residents. This is a bit less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also awarded this facility a favorable grade in nursing. This facility earned a grade of B in this category, which is one of our better grades. In computing our nursing scores, we analyze both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Massachusetts in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

The last category we analyzed was short-term care. This nursing home was given a grade of C in this area. Short-term care grades are important for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.