Heritage House of New Castle

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in that category with a grade of A+. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

We also awarded this facility a positive grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a grade of B in this area, which turns out to be one of our more favorable grades. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 83.62573 percent of its patients. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home received its next best category grade in the category of short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of C in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable grade. Our short-term care ratings are likely more meaningful for those needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

The next area we graded is nursing, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is certainly a major disappointment. Nursing grades are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.