Heritage Health-Minonk

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We weighed the qualifications of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in computing our score in this area. 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 nursing home 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 many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's inspections. We awarded it a grade of A for that category. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning our third category, this facility was given an excellent long-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our final area, we gave this facility an A for our short-term care rating. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.