Heritage Lakeside

While we gave this place a poor overall score, we awarded it a B+ for our inspections rating. This is due to the nursing home receiving a quality government inspection report this year. Our inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an C. Our nursing grade weighs a variety of datapoints. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Another issue was the F this facility received in the area of short-term care. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This category is more often than not a useful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to the final category, this facility didn't fare well in this category either. With a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 96.268654 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.