Heritage House Nursing Center

To go along with a favorable overall score, we awarded this place an A+ for inspections. Our inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many elite grades, this facility was given an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. There are numerous subcategories included in this area. Most of the subcategories relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we graded is short-term care. We awarded this facility a solid grade in that area, with a B-. Although this isn't on par with several of this facility's other grades, it is nevertheless not a terrible score. Our short-term care grade is typically used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below average.