Heritage Place

Heritage Place is located in Soldotna, Alaska, a city with a population of 14,191 people. Sporting an overall score of A+, this nursing home is undoubtedly a phenomenal facility. We also wanted to point out that this place is based in a hospital. Typically, this means that more intensive healthcare services are available. Scroll down to see this facility's category grades, which are equally impressive. You really can't do any better than a straight A profile.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In calculating our nursing grades, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided 5.7 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This was one of the highest figures we found. Furthermore, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. Both of these statistics are impressive. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this facility was also above average in several of the major quality-based metrics we assessed in this category. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Among its many high-end grades, this nursing home was awarded first-rate long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the statistics we considered after this nursing home's impressive nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 99.47369 percent of its residents. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for seniors. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Not many facilities fared better in this area. With our short-term care score, we try to create a valuable barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. One of this place's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This place performed better than most nursing homes in this area with 54.3 percent of its residents returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

Wrapping up this nursing home's impressive resume, we gave this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. With this grade, the nursing home completes its straight A report card. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.