Evangeline Oaks Guest House

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home also earned first-rate inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our best scores in this category, with an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it was given a favorable long-term care score. Indeed, long-term care ended up being its second most favorable category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 89.09657 percent of its residents. This is a few points below what we were hoping for. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Nursing ratings are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This place averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Moving on to the next category, we gave this facility a grade of D for the area of short-term care. This was the facility's least impressive category grade. Unfortunately, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Short-term care grades are often used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we assessed. The final item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.