Heritage Healthcare Center at Tallahassee

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this facility an A for our inspections rating. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

Adding to its strong performance in other categories, we awarded this nursing home an B+ for our nursing rating. Nursing grades are largely tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a resident even once per day.

This facilities next most favorable area was long-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this category. In the category of long-term care, we analyze the amount of care offered by a facility, rather than more medically-intensive services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.21875 percent of its patients. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home was awarded a grade of C in short-term care, which is a respectable score. Our short-term care ratings are vital for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that just 3.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.