Heritage Park Nursing Center

In addition to earning a quality overall grade, this nursing home also earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best grades in that category, with an A. Inspection scores account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor dings aren't something to panic about.

We also want to point out the fact that this nursing home was given a high-end score of A- in our short-term care category. Our short-term care scores are believed to be most critical for folks needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility with 63.4 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this metric.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. When calculating our nursing grades, we analyze both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This place provides a very impressive 4.7 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is among the highest totals in the state. Finally, this facility also performed well in several of the quality measures we assessed. For example, in terms of the percentage of its residents sustaining falls which lead to major injury, this facility performed as well as any facility in California. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B. While this wound up being its lowest category rating, this is nevertheless a strong rating. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of offering very impressive levels of nursing care, this facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.68 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.