Heritage Inn of Sandersville Health and Rehab

To pair with a favorable overall grade, we gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspection category. Inspection scores are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection 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.

Contributing to its dominant profile, this facility also performed well in our long-term care area. In fact, it received a grade of A- for the category. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also was awarded a favorable short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this nursing home received a highly favorable nursing grade. Even though this wasn't quite as dominant as a few of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive scores a facility can receive. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.