Heritage House Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this place ended up being a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this critical area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors 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.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our long-term care grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. The nursing score is based on a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we rated ended up being this nursing home's poorest area. However, even in its weakest link we still gave it a decent grade of C for short-term care. In determining our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.