Bethesda Dilworth

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an excellent short-term care score, with a grade of A-. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses spend with residents and the levels of training of the nurses. This particular nursing home 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 Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

We gave this facility an impressive grade of A- for our inspections rating. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The fourth area we rated is long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B+. This completed a very impressive report card. Very few nursing homes received a B+ or better in all four categories. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 61.01695 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be a bit below what we were hoping for but still a decent figure. 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.