Courtyard of Natchitoches

Courtyard of Natchitoches is located in Natchitoches, Louisiana, a city with a population of 27,809 people. Sporting an overall score of B, this is a fine facility. We also wanted to point out that this facility is based in a hospital. Typically, this indicates that more intensive medical services are available. The best aspect of this facility's impressive profile is its inspection score. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A+ in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility fared well in the category of long-term care. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our higher grades. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. This facility was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.52 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. There are many criteria within this grade. Most of these datapoints reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. This nursing home performed admirably in this metric. Avoiding major falls is typically an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility offers enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Switching gears to the fourth category, we awarded this facility a D in our short-term care category. This was the facility's worst category grade. Of course, this grade hurt the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it offered less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 36.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.