Preton Place-Ruston

Preton Place-Ruston is one of just three nursing homes in Ruston, Louisiana. This nursing home a respectable overall score of B-, which surprisingly resulted in it being the top nursing home in Ruston. Based on our assessment, this place ought to be a good fit for most people. The best part of this place's profile is its exemplary inspection grade. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A+. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this facility received favorable long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that area, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second strongest score. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to providing very impressive levels of nursing care and other staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This figure is also significantly better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this nursing home had 3.33 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this area, this number may be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this nursing home a score of D. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses worked with residents, in determining our score in this area. In this facility's case, quantity of care does not appear to be the problem. According to its CMS reports, this nursing home provided an average of 4.1 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which was above the national average. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this facility's nursing grade substantially.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, which was this facility's worst category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in that area. Unfortunately, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall grade a bit. In our short-term care rating, we try to create a valuable barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 42.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.