Herman Health Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving residents even once per day.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our more positive scores in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last category we analyzed was short-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this category. Of course, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. In this facility's case, it looks like it offers fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.