Heritage Rehabilitation & Living Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing grade. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.

We also gave this facility a grade of A for our short-term care grade. In our short-term care grade, we seek to create a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility received a very good inspection report this year as well. For this reason, it earned one of our higher scores in that area with a B. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home was awarded a decent long-term care score. Although this isn't as strong as several of its other grades, this is truly not the end of the world. Long-term care scores are vital for patients requiring personal care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. We were disappointed to learn that this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 77.52809 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Fortunately, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.