Gretna Care Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A. Inspection scores are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also would like to note that this nursing home was awarded impressive short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more impressive scores in that area, with a grade of B. This turned out to be the nursing home's second strongest score. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

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. We scrutinized the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The final category we scored is long-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is clearly a significant concern. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this facility vaccinated a relatively low 90.57971 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.