Complete Care at La Plata

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility's second highest area ended up being short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is typically used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. In determining a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the amount of time nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of licensure 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. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Switching gears to our next category, we awarded this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category. This is the facility's least impressive category grade. Of course, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall profile a bit. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility provided the vaccine to only 78.40909 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.