Ballwin Ridge Health & Rehabilitation

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient even once per day.

This nursing home is also above average in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It performed better than most nursing homes in this area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.93617 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In our final area, we awarded this nursing home an A for our short-term care rating. This topped off a very favorable report card. Our short-term care grades are crucial for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing. This includes a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.