Heritage Square Healthcare Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

One of this nursing home's more respectable category grades was in the area of long-term care. This turned out to be its second most respectable category. In that area, we awarded this facility a B-. With our long-term care assessment, we look at the volume of care provided by a nursing home, along with a few quality datapoints. We were missing a few metrics in calculating this nursing home's long-term care rating, so this score might not be as accurate as our other category scores.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. The nursing grade features a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat concerning figure as it is well below the national average. Finally, nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The final area we assessed was short-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that category. Sadly, this category pulled down the facility's overall profile to some degree. Short-term care scores are meaningful for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it provided less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.