Lacombe Nursing Center

To pair with its favorable overall performance, we awarded this place a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area typically have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so well is that it received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second most favorable category score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. For patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 79.62963 percent of its residents. This is a bit below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of C in this category is by no means a bad score. We weighed the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses spent with residents, in computing our score in this area. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

This nursing home's weakest area was short-term care, which is the last area we scored. In this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. In forming these short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.1 percent of its patients returning home.