Heritage Health Care Center

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this place also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned a grade of A. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, this facility received a category L deficiency, which is not what we expected based on its inspection score. These are the worst type of deficiencies. This category of deficiency indicates CMS found a widespread deficiency putting resident health or safety in imminent jeopardy. Any serious deficiency is a major concern. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

This facility also received a favorable long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it an above average score of B in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 95.34884 percent of its residents, which is more than most nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of short-term care, where it was awarded a score of B. It performed better than most nursing homes in this category. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Switching gears to our final category, this facility was given an acceptable nursing score of B-. Our nursing score consists of quite a few subcategories, however, the paramount one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It scored well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.