Heritage Health-Dwight

Heritage Health-Dwight is an average-sized nursing home located in Dwight, Illinois. With an overall rating of A-, this facility is among the better nursing homes we assessed. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top third of all facilities in the country. This nursing home's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection score, which we will address in the next section.

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are nearly flawless. Our inspection scores weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility also performed well in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Not many facilities received a better grade in this category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that it outperformed the majority of facilities in this area with 53.2 percent of its residents returning home. This is a higher rate than most nursing homes.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. The nursing score assesses a handful of subcategories, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. This facility received a very good long-term care score in our assessment, with a grade of B-. Although this is not as dominant as many of its other grades, this is still an acceptable grade in this area. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's assistance with daily living rather than the skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very solid percentage. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. With 1.95 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this place is not too far off the national average.