Heritage Inn of Sandersville Health and Rehab

Heritage Inn of Sandersville Health and Rehab is a small non-profit nursing home located in Sandersville, Georgia. This nursing home was awarded an A- overall, which is one of our better grades. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top quarter of all facilities nationally. If you scroll down, you will see this place's category scores, which are also strong.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that CMS 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 an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a very strong long-term care score. In fact, this is its second most impressive category score. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also was given a strong short-term care score. Indeed, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this area. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

In the last category we graded, this facility received a very strong grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a very strong profile. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.