Heritage Manor Stratmore Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility also received an impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, we gave them a grade of B+ in this area, which is one of our better. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. One of the statistics we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third area we analyzed was short-term care. This facility's received a poor short-term care score where it was given an F. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final area we rated was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is a poor score. This is clearly a major disappointment. The nursing score includes a handful of subcategories, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. In addition to being below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing rating significantly.