Herman Health Care Center

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. There are a variety of criteria within this category. Most of the datapoints are tied to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our better grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next category we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home was given a strong short-term care score this year, with a C. Even though this isn't nearly as good as a few of its other scores, this is still a decent rating in this category. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It does not look like this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.