Evangeline Oaks Guest House

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A-. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a score of A- in that category, which happens to be one of our highest scores. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 74.0634 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points below what we expected but still a respectable figure. 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 only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This facility averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is a very low figure. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning residents even once per day.

Switching gears to the last category, this nursing home didn't fare very well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in short-term care, this was this facility's weakest category. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provides fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 2.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.