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 short-term care grade, with a grade of A. Short-term care scores are based on the facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing score weighs many components, however, the most important one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient even once per day.

Moving on to our last area, this facility also excelled in the long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. This rounded out a straight A report card. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 94.81482 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.