The Harrison at Heritage

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received first-rate inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best grades in this area, with an A. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Adding to its profile, this nursing home also received a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. The last datapoint we looked at was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this place had 6.46 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this wasn't as favorable as some of its other scores in this category, this number may be skewed for some nursing homes due to some of the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave them one of our more positive scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. With our short-term care score, we strive to forge a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that returned home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 62.2 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this metric.

The final area we scored is nursing, in which this facility was given a C. This actually is this facility's worst area. This is nevertheless not the end of the world. Nursing scores are primarily based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.