Heron's Key

We also found that this facility excelled at short-term care. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Short-term care grades are crucial for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A+. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place 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 generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident more often.

Turning the page to our next category, this top-shelf facility also dominated in the category of long-term care. In this category, we awarded it a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 90.14085 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a bit below what we were hoping for but still a decent figure. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Finally, we wanted to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.