Heritage Health-Staunton

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this nursing home's more respectable category scores was in the area of short-term care. This ended up being its second most favorable category. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its level of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

The next most favorable category we gave this facility in any category came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a C. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.74468 percent of its patients. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Switching gears to our final area, this facility didn't fare very well. With a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is this nursing home's weakest area. Our nursing rating is based on a variety of data points. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.