Heritage House Nursing and Rehabilitation

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility truly excelled in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Only a select group of nursing homes performed better in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses spend with residents as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

This nursing home's weakest category was short-term care, which is the final area we looked at. For this category, we awarded this facility a D. We want to to point out this possible weak spot, but you should not over-emphasize a single bad category either. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. It appears that this place was below average in several staffing areas we looked at. It provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.