The Chateau Girardeau

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its high-end profile, this nursing home also was given an excellent long-term care grade, with a grade of A. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 97.28261 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on our third area, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its short-term care score. This is a very strong score. Our short-term care scores are likely more critical for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

In the last category, this facility also was awarded an excellent nursing rating, with a grade of A-. This wrapped up a rare straight A report card. Nursing ratings are largely associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This place was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.