Heritage Health-Minonk

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care rating. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.71795 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Very few nursing homes received a better grade in this area. Our short-term care scores are presumably most meaningful for residents requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Turning to the next area, this facility was given a high-end nursing rating. In fact, we gave it an A- in this area, rounding out a straight A profile. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided with better nursing care.