Heritage Health-Litchfield

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also performed well in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities fared as well in this category. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to point out the fact that this nursing home was awarded a dominant grade of A- in our long-term care category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.4012 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. Our nursing grade is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we scored was short-term care. This nursing home was given an above average nursing score in our assessment, with a B. Although this is not quite as impressive as a few of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive grades in that area. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.