Heritage Health-Peru

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this nursing home was given favorable short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our better grades in this area, with a grade of B. This proved to be the nursing home's second best score. Our short-term care grade is generally used to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

We also gave this nursing home a solid score in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Our long-term care grade is generally used to grade a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. Once we assessed the volume of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. This nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home was awarded a C for nursing, which we consider to be an acceptable grade. Our nursing rating looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we look at quality-based metrics, such as the percentage of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these metrics are indicators of the quality of nursing care.