Heritage Manor of Ville Platte

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in that area with an A-. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's deficiencies. We would like to have more information about this facility. Without having complete deficiency related data, it ended up being a challenge to grade this nursing home in this category.

Additionally, we gave this facility a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our better grades. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are well cared for. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 90.32258 percent of its residents. This is a few points less than we expected but still a decent percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. The nursing score includes quite a few factors, many of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, while this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of our quality metrics. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this area.

This facility's worst area is short-term care, which is the last area we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category. Despite some respectable grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless of a concern so we would like to to draw your attention to it. In crafting these short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. As you might expect, we discovered that this place offers substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 2.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.