Heritage Health Services

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility earned a far better grade for short-term care than it received overall. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. In forming these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Nursing grades are primarily tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also earned a very favorable inspection score. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The next area we rated is long-term care, which was this facility's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is certainly very concerning. For residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average percentage. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.