Heritage Health-Gillespie

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home performed well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a score of A for that area, which happens to be one of our higher scores. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing grade assesses several datapoints, but the paramount consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this metric. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning residents even once per day.

The final area we scored was short-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a C. Our short-term care scores are critical for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 3.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.