Heritage Specialty Care

While we gave this nursing home an abysmal overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our nursing category. The nursing rating includes a host of factors. The most important one is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Remarkably, we awarded this facility a B- for its short-term care rating, which really isn't a bad grade. In computing these short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Moving on to the area of long-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in this area. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.9633 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Unfortunately, this nursing home did not receive a favorable inspection score. We gave it a just D in this category. Inspection scores relate to a nursing home's government inspection reports. We weight poor inspection ratings heavily in our assessment. Since government inspection reports are compiled by independent government inspectors, we consider this information to be very reliable. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. We suggest you pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with a category G through L deficiency, which are among the more serious categories of deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies identified by inspectors had the potential to pose actual harm to residents. In addition to having severe deficiencies, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.