Luling Care Center

Unfortunately, we did not have any good things to write about this facility's overall grade or its other ratings. Its best area is the category of inspections. However, with a D in this category, it still performed badly. One of the most significant factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We suggest you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility had 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this facility was assessed significant government fines totaling over $100,000. This typically signifies that a nursing home's bad track record has been an issue for more than one year.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this nursing home was given a grade of just D in that category. As it turns out, this wound up being one of its better grades. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

We were stunned to find that this nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing. We awarded it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our nursing score analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home received an abysmal grade in this category as well. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is definitely a major disappointment. In forming our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.