Heritage Health-Mount Sterling

This nursing home earned a short-term care score which is better than its overall score. We awarded this facility a B in this area. This helped its overall profile quite a bit. In crafting our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. 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 assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Nursing scores are largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients at least once a day.

This nursing home also received favorable government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a B. This grade is also better than the nursing home's overall score. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this facility was awarded a grade of C for long-term care, which we consider to be a decent grade. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to just 88.4058 percent of its residents, which is slightly concerning. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.