Heritage Nursing and Rehabilitation Community

Heritage Nursing and Rehabilitation Community is one of just a couple available nursing homes in Zeeland, Michigan. With an A- overall grade, we ranked this facility in the top third of all facilities in the country. This is really as good of a facility as you'll find. If you scroll down, you can see this nursing home's category grades, which are also quite good.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility earned near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This area is generally a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Michigan in this area with 67.7 percent of its patients returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this area. This particular nursing home provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a patient more often.

The final category we looked at is long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B. This actually is this nursing home's worst area. A nursing home is doing something right when it's worst grade still is superior to most nursing homes. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.916664 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. 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 less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.