Louisville Care Center

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care grade, which is not an impressive grade. In forming these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

This nursing home's least impressive category is nursing, which is the final category we assessed. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This place provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.