The Heights on Huebner

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Inspection grades are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Additionally, we gave this facility a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable grades. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.67427 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We awarded this facility just a D for our short-term care score. This is not one of our better scores. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.9 percent of its residents returning home.

The last area we assessed is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. This is obviously a major concern. Nursing ratings are largely tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. In addition to its below average nursing hour totals, this place earned suboptimal marks in some of the quality-based measures we considered in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that more of this facility's patients suffered falls leading to major injury. We would argue that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this place receiving a terrible nursing score.