Louisiana Extended Care Hospital of Lafayette

To go along with its favorable overall grade, we gave this facility a grade of A+ for inspections. Our inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we were able to find information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Nursing scores are mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provides an incredible 7.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in Louisiana in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided.

This facility also was elite in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few facilities received a better grade in this area. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. It does not look like this nursing home provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last area, this facility also received an excellent short-term care rating, with a grade of A. This wrapped up a first-rate report card. In forming these short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This nursing home is the gold standard in terms of skilled nursing staffing. In fact, it provided roughly 1.5 times as many registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average nursing home. This is what we like to find when grading a facility in this category. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.