The Heritage

In addition to being a strong facility overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly perfect. Inspection scores are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's above average category scores came in the category of short-term care. We gave them one of our stronger grades in that area, with a grade of B+. Short-term care grades are generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our higher grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final area we analyzed is nursing, which ended up being this nursing home's worst area. We awarded this nursing home a D in this category. However, you shouldn't assess this facility based solely on a single area, since it earned multiple very strong grades in other categories. We weighed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Unfortunately, this nursing home also didn't perform as well as we had hoped in some of the quality measures we looked at for this category.