Life Care Center of La Center

On top of being a great facility overall, it also earned A+ inspections recently. Its inspections are nearly flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable long-term care scores this year. Indeed, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.42197 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing rating is based on a handful of components, but the main one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. For example, in terms of the number of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented with better nursing care.

The next category we scored was short-term care, where this facility received a B. While this proved to be its weakest category grade, this is still a good score. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. This place performed decently in this area, with 48.6 percent of its patients returning home.