Ruston Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to note that this facility was awarded a great long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it one of our most impressive grades in that area with a grade of A-. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 73.443985 percent of its residents, which is somewhat below what we were hoping for. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we gave this nursing home an F. This is certainly not one of this facility's better areas. We assessed the licensure of nurses at the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last area we rated was short-term care, which ended up being this nursing home's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is clearly a major disappointment. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we discovered that this facility offers fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.7 percent of its residents returning home.