Heritage Manor of Baton Rouge

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility really outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best grades in this area with an A. Inspection ratings are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. It does not look like we have deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive grades. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We awarded this facility just a D for our short-term care grade. This is not a very good score. Our short-term care scores are critical for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With a score of this caliber for this area, we were not stunned to discover that this place was well below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It supplied significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

The final area we scored is nursing. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this area, which is a poor score. This is clearly a significant concern. When computing a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.