Marrero Healthcare 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. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home's second most favorable area is its short-term care grade, where it was given a grade of C. Our short-term care grades are critical for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The real question is whether this also affected quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Moving on to the category of long-term care, this facility received just a D in that area. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.05064 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The last area we assessed is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive category. It received an abysmal F for this category, which is certainly a major concern. There are a host of data points included in this grade. Many of the criteria relate to staffing levels. This facility averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is not a very impressive figure. In addition to ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.