Heritage House of Richmond

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have few severe deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, with a strong grade of A- in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next highest area turned out to be short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. In determining these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. We were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this place. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.

The next area we graded is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest area. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is certainly a major concern. In calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.