Belle Teche Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to note its relatively favorable long-term care grade this year. We gave it a B in this area. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.745544 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to minimize negative health outcomes for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Shockingly, this nursing home actually earned a good grade in the area of inspections as well. We gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Not many facilities that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid nursing homes that had a long list of deficiencies. It does not appear that we have deficiency data for this nursing home. We wish we had more information about this facility. Without all of the information regarding deficiencies, it was challenging to evaluate the place in the area of inspections.

Sadly, this facility's third highest score is short-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. Our short-term care grade is often employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Given its score in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the figures we assessed. The final item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this nursing home really did not fare well in this area either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is just about as bad as it gets. In determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is quite a bit below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.