Heritage Rehabilitation & Living Center

Heritage Rehabilitation & Living Center is the sole option located in Winthrop, Maine. After receiving an A+ overall grade, this nursing home has the distinction of being one of the 50 best nursing homes in Maine. This is really as good of a facility as you'll find. If you scroll down, you can see this nursing home's category grades, which are also quite good.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility earned near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing ratings are largely based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides an incredible 4.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of that total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the country in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided.

The third area we analyzed was short-term care. This nursing home also was given an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to be awarded several A+ category grades. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. One of this facility's strengths is that it offers more than seven hours of care per week from registered nurses per patient. This is really the gold standard in this area, as it's approximately 50% higher than a typical place's level of registered nurse staffing. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. It fared as well as just about any facility in Maine in this area with 65.3 percent of its patients returning home.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care, where this facility received a grade of B. While this wound up being its poorest category rating, this is still a good grade. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to providing elite levels of nursing care, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. This combination proved to be effective as this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.