Elsberry Missouri Health Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its high-end assessments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A for our long-term care rating. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B. It performed more favorably than most facilities in this category. With our short-term care category, we try to craft a valuable barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last area we graded was nursing, in which this facility was awarded a grade of B. Believe it or not, this proved to be this facility's worst area. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when it's weakest score still rates higher than most other facilities. In calculating a facility's nursing score, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are with residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.