Barnes-Jewish Extended Care

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In calculating our nursing grades, we weigh both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also received a top-shelf short-term care grade. This actually ended up being this nursing home's second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A. Our short-term care grades are important for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing services. This includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

The next category we scored is long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a solid grade of B-. This was this nursing home's least impressive category. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.