Heritage Oaks Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better scores in that area, with an A. This is a notably better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category usually have few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this nursing home's higher category scores was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next best area we awarded this nursing home in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. Short-term care grades are typically used to grade a facility's rehabilitation services To have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

Turning to our next area, this nursing home really did not fare very well. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this was its poorest category grade. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This statistic is far below the national average. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. 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 data points. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.