Wexner Heritage House

Wexner Heritage House is an average-sized non-profit facility in Columbus, Ohio. This facility was given an A- overall, which is one of the most impressive ratings we offer. A score of this caliber requires first-rate marks across the board. Even in a city with 36 nursing homes, this facility stood out. This nursing home's impressive profile was highlighted by its short-term care grade, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In computing these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Ohio in this area with 64.8 percent of its patients returning home. With most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Not many nursing homes performed as well in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. There are several subcategories included in this grade. Most of the datapoints reflect levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 4.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is among the higher totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We are very impressed by both of these figures. On top of offering high levels of nursing care, this place also performed well in several of the quality measures we assessed. In terms of the number of its residents suffering falls resulting in major injury, this facility performed as well as any nursing home the country.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, in which this facility received a grade of C. This actually was this facility's worst category. This is nevertheless not a poor grade. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After looking at the above average volume of nursing care provided by this nursing home, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 97.44898 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which appears to be higher than most nursing homes. This combination proved to be effective as this facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. While it had 1.97 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most facilities since it had more complicated patients.