Delmar Gardens of Creve Coeur

Although we did not rate this nursing home highly overall, we want to draw your attention to its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid places that have a long list of severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider 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 necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home was awarded its second highest category score in the area of short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of C in this category, which is a decent score. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a meaningful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The tricky part is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 6.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

This facility wound up receiving a a terrible score in our long-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this area. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 93.37017 percent of its patients. This is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a decent figure. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home did not fare well in this area either. With a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is about as terrible as it gets. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This place fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.