Heritage Health-Gibson City

With an address in Gibson City, Illinois, Heritage Health-Gibson City is one of a mere two nursing homes in this city. It looks like this nursing home is ranked among the better facilities we looked at. A score in this range requires very strong marks across the board. We were so impressed with this facility that we ranked it in the top third of all facilities in the country. As you will see below, this facility also performed just fine in our category grades. It would be hard to find any major flaws in this facility's profile.

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Very few places fared this well in this area. Inspection scores are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an impressive long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B+ in this area. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.01961 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.73 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we assessed was this nursing home's worst area. Nevertheless, even its lowest point would be a highlight for most facilities. In fact, we gave it an above average grade of B for short-term care. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, we found that this nursing home provided respectable levels of physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This place performed decently in this area, with 48.8 percent of its residents returning home.