The Lafayette-Redeemer

On top of receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, which is based on its inspection reports. We gave it a grade of A in that category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Contributing to its high-end assessment, this nursing home also was awarded a strong short-term care score, with a score of A. Short-term care grades are typically used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing grade is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning residents even once per day.

The next category we rated was long-term care. This facility was awarded a favorable nursing rating in our assessment, with a B. Even though this wasn't as impressive as a few of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our better scores for that category. For residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 86.243385 percent of its residents, which is somewhat less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.