Heritage Place

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in nursing, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. The nursing rating includes a number of datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provided 0.6 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning residents even once per day.

On the list of its many dominant grades, this nursing home was given first-rate short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home also earned excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best grades in that area, with an A. Inspection ratings are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

In our last area, we gave this facility a grade of A for its long-term care grade. This wrapped up a very strong profile. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.941795 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.