Gueydan Memorial Guest Home

One of the reasons this proved to be a strong facility is that it earned a very impressive long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care is its best grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an A+. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our best grades. Our inspection scores weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received its second least favorable score in the category of short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this area, which is a relatively poor grade. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

The next category we analyzed is nursing. We gave this facility a D for our nursing category, making this the nursing home's worst area. The nursing category includes quite a few factors, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. While this nursing home's nursing hours were below average, it surprised us in a few of the qualitative data points in this category. In particular, we were pleased to see that its residents are suffering fewer pressure ulcers than the national average.