Guest House of Slidell

One of the many reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so favorably is that it was given a dominant long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. 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. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.82006 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home's weakest category is short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. For this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of just D. We would like to to point out this potential weakness, but you should not over-emphasize one area either. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.