Heritage House of Marshall Health & Rehabilitation

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another one of this facility's better category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a B. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it 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 a remarkably low figure.

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. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This facility's least impressive area is short-term care, which is the final area we scored. We gave it an abysmal F in this area. Even with a few decent scores in other categories, this grade is nevertheless disappointing so we would like to to make a note of it. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is generally a fair assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score in this range in this category, we were not stunned to learn that this nursing home was well below average in multiple staffing metrics we focus on. In fact, it supplied far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.4 percent of its patients returning home.