Courtyard of Natchitoches

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. Its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Our inspection grades are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A. Not many facilities performed more favorably in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 99.67427 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's second least favorable score is short-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a well below average grade. Short-term care scores are crucial for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

This facility's worst area is nursing, which is the final area we looked at. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category. Despite a few acceptable grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless alarming so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This particular place averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these data points to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.