Delmar Gardens of Meramec Valley

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. In computing our nursing scores, we look at both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is an alarmingly low total. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these datapoints to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

Sadly, this facility's third highest score was short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is more often than not a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Based on its grade in this category, we were not surprised to discover that this place is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.

The next area we graded is long-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category, which is a rock bottom score. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 93.333336 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.