Heritage House Rehabilitation & Health Care Center

Heritage House Rehabilitation & Health Care Center is an average-sized government-owned nursing home located in Connersville, Indiana. We gave it an overall grade of B-, which is a middle of the road rating. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Connersville. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's profile is its exemplary inspection score, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed favorably in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A-. Not many facilities fared better in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 97.16089 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.44 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes.

The third category we assessed is short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of C in this category. Short-term care ratings are meaningful for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home and discovered this was this facility's strongest datapoint within this category. It performed well in this metric with 59.5 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this metric.

The next category we looked at was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is certainly a major concern. We assessed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. In addition to its weak nursing hours, this nursing home earned poor marks in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We found that more of this nursing home's residents suffered falls leading to major injury. We believe that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this facility receiving a terrible nursing grade.