Delmar Gardens of Chesterfield

Although we were not high on this place overall, we awarded it a grade of B for our inspections category. This score is far better than the nursing home's overall score. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home was awarded its next most favorable category grade in the category of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a C in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable score. In the area of long-term care, we analyze the amount of care offered by a facility, rather than more sophisticated services. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 64.90066 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a few points lower than average. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this nursing home only earned a D for its short-term care grade, which is not a score to write home about. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Given its weak grade in this category, we weren't stunned to find this facility provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

Turning to our final category, we awarded this nursing home a D for our nursing category. This was the facility's worst category grade. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses commit to patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in both of these data points. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.