Heritage Health Services

Heritage Health Services is the lone facility located in Port Washington, Wisconsin. We awarded it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the pack score. You could definitely do worse than this place. The best part of this facility's profile was is its short-term care grade. We discuss short-term care in the next paragraph.

We gave this nursing home one of our higher scores in the area of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A-. This is notably better than the nursing home's overall grade, which was certainly not elite. Our short-term care scores are likely most meaningful for people in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. This nursing home provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. This is what we like to find when assessing a nursing home in this category. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who returned to the community from this facility. This place performed decently in this area, with 46 percent of its patients returning home.

We also want to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of B+ in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Another reason we rated this facility so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is as good as it gets in this area. The nursing category weighs a handful of components, most of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This facility offers 3.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, of which more than an hour of those were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. In calculating our nursing grades, we add more weight to hours performed by registered or licensed nurses. 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 frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final category we looked at is long-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. It received an abysmal F in this area, which is clearly very disappointing. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.373985 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable statistic. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.