Heritage Manor

In addition to a phenomenal overall grade, this facility also received A+ nursing grade. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was superb in our long-term care rating. We gave them a dominant grade of A+ in this area. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Tallying another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it received an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to our next category, this nursing home received an extremely favorable short-term care rating. We gave it a B+ in this category, topping off one of our more impressive report cards. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.