Festus Manor

With an address in Festus, Missouri, Festus Manor is one of a mere three available nursing homes in the city. We awarded this facility an overall grade of B-. A grade in this range requires some solid scores. Based on our assessment, this facility ought to meet the needs of many people. Finally, this facility had an ownership change in the last year, so we'll have to see if that has any effect on its grades in the coming year.

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection ratings are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, with top-shelf score of A in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. The last statistic we assessed is the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 3.82 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this wasn't as strong as some of its other scores in this category, this figure can be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

This nursing home was given an F in the category of short-term care. Sadly, this is about as bad as it gets in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is typically a solid assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 28.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final area we analyzed is nursing. It received a lowly F for this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is clearly a major concern. We analyzed the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this category. This facility provided only 3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is an alarmingly low total. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.