Life Care Center of South Las Vegas

This facility's best category grade came in the area of inspections. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B+. It actually outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Inspection ratings are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility received high grades in the category of nursing as well. In fact, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an B-. Nursing grades are mostly associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it did very well in this metric. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

The third area we assessed is short-term care, where this facility received a grade of C in this area. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing. This means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we analyzed was long-term care. It received an F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is clearly a significant concern. Long-term care grades in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 90.588234 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit less than average. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.