Heritage Healthcare

It should also be noted that this facility's short-term care grade outperformed its overall grade. We gave it a grade of B+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care scores are vital for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of B+ in this area. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. When computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are seeing residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared with most other facilities. Lastly, our nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

Turning to our next area, this facility was given a decent long-term care score of C. Long-term care scores are based on the facility's volume of care. This includes a vast range of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.618324 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. This place also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.