Luling Care Center

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to draw your attention to its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid places that had a long list of severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

The next best area we awarded this nursing home in any category came in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a B-. In computing our long-term care grades, we analyze the assistance with daily living received by the facility's patients. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, we gave this facility an F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing grade weighs a handful of datapoints, however, the main consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we rated was short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is often a meaningful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Not surprisingly, we found that this facility offers substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.