Heritage Health-Springfield

Heritage Health-Springfield is a large nursing home located in Springfield, Illinois. Featuring an overall score of D, this is a relatively poor nursing home. This nursing home has very little going for it. Nevertheless, this nursing home surprisingly performed well in our inspections category, which you can find more information about below.

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Inspection scores are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Sadly, this nursing home's second best category is long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still fared somewhat poorly. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.754906 percent of its residents. Unfortunately, its hospitalization rate was not nearly as favorable. We found that this nursing home had 2.42 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an alarming rate.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the source of this facility's poor nursing grade. This facility provides 4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is above average. In calculating our grades, we apply more weight to hours performed by more highly trained nurses such as registered nurses. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade substantially.

This facility's least impressive area was short-term care, which is the final category we assessed. For this category, we gave this facility a grade of D. In the category of short-term care, we strive to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. With a grade this poor for this area, we weren't shocked to discover that this facility was below average in many staffing figures we assess. The facility supplied substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 40.5 percent of its residents returning home.