Ouachita Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center

Ouachita Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center is a large nursing home located in Monroe, Louisiana. Featuring an overall score of C, this looks like a decent nursing home. Based on our assessment, there are certainly far worse nursing homes out there. One of the best aspects of this facility's profile is its remarkable inspection reports, which we will address in the next section.

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite long-term care score. Indeed, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a great way to avoid negative health outcomes for the senior population. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this place had 2.32 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

This nursing home also earned a strong nursing rating. In fact, we gave it a F in this area. Nursing scores are mostly tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its low nursing hours. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this area. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.

The next area we scored was short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it an F for this area, which is obviously concerning. In calculating our short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the measures we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 28.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.