Heritage House of New Castle

Heritage House of New Castle is an average-sized government-owned nursing home located in New Castle, Indiana. This nursing home received an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the pack grade. The nursing homes in New Castle received quality scores across the board with a city grade of a B. The best part of this place's report card was its exemplary inspection reports. We discuss inspections in the next paragraph.

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This is far better than the facility's overall rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite minor. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not 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 an excellent sign.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave it a high-end long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded this facility a score of A-. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.039215 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 2.09 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care grade. This is not an impressive grade. In our short-term care score, we attempt to craft a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we looked at. The final statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 44.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this facility didn't perform very well. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this was this facility's poorest grade. Our nursing category is based on quite a few subcategories, many of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.