Bayou Pines Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this nursing home also received top notch health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher grades in this category, with an A+. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Adding to this nursing home's list of accomplishments, it also was given a very favorable long-term care score. We gave them a dominant strong of A- in this category. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.710144 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing score assesses many factors, however, the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared to most facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

Moving on to the fourth area, we awarded this facility a D in short-term care. This is the nursing home's least impressive category grade. Of course, this score hurt the facility's overall grade to some degree. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it provided less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.