Heritage Health-Litchfield

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are virtually perfect. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing score is primarily associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients more often.

This facility is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B. It outpaced most facilities in this area. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next area we looked at is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a solid score in that category, with a grade of B-. Although this is not on par with some of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless not a bad grade. In the category of long-term care, we weigh the amount of care provided by a nursing home, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.809525 percent of its patients. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.