South Heritage Health & Rehabilitation Center

South Heritage Health & Rehabilitation Center is a small non-profit facility located in Saint Petersburg, Florida. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the road score. Based on our ratings, this place ought to meet the needs of many people. The best part of this place's profile was its stellar inspection score. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph.

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in this category with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The second most favorable category we awarded this nursing home in any area came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a C. Our long-term care grade is used to score a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 99.55357 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 3.27 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this number can be skewed for some facilities based on the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

This nursing home's third best area is short-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average grade in this area. Short-term care scores are crucial for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 30.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The last category we rated was nursing, which was this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that area. The nursing rating analyzes quite a few factors, however, the main one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is below the national average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility.