Heritage Nursing Center

With an address in Haynesville, Louisiana, Heritage Nursing Center is the lone nursing home located in the city. Featuring an overall score of B-, this is likely a decent facility. As far as we can see, this nursing home should be a solid choice for quite a few people. The best part of this facility's report card was its remarkable inspection reports. We discuss inspections in the next section.

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than its overall grade. Our inspection scores are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Unfortunately, it does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it one of our best scores in that category with a grade of A. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. With 1.8 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility was just about middle of the road in this area.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing rating is based on many datapoints, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. Quantity of nursing care does not appear to be the source of this facility's poor nursing grade. This nursing home provides 4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is actually better than we expected. In calculating our ratings, we apply more weight to hours performed by more highly trained nurses such as registered nurses. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this facility didn't perform as well in the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was above the national average in both statistics. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics dragged down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.

The last area we scored was short-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive area. It received an abysmal F for this area, which is certainly very concerning. In our short-term care rating, we strive to create a sound measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 33.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.