Heritage Health-Carlinville

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's long-term care grade appears to be one of its respectable scores. The facility was awarded a grade of C in this area. Long-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's volume of nursing care. This includes a vast scope of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated only 90.38461 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received an F for its nursing grade. In computing our nursing ratings, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home really did not fare very well in this area either. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most critical for those in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its abysmal score in this area, we were not shocked to learn this nursing home offers far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.