Herman Health Care Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive inspection score. Inspections turned out to be its best category. In that area, we gave it an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. Our nursing grade is mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. This nursing home was given a very positive long-term care score, with a grade of B in the area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we rated is short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a solid grade in that category, with a grade of C. While this isn't as high as a few of this facility's other scores, it is still not the end of the world. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. It does not look like this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 3.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.