East Prairie Nursing Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category grade. In this area, we awarded it a grade of A. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This facility is also strong in the area of long-term care, where it was given a grade of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this area. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 73.91305 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we expected. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning residents at least once a day.

Turning to the last category, this facility received a C for short-term care, which is generally an acceptable grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.