Forest Park Health Campus

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in that category, with an A. This is a much better grade than the place's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor dings aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home also was given an impressive grade in our short-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B in that area. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility's second lowest category was long-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The next category we looked at was nursing, ended up being this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. This really was one of the few dings on a quality report card. Our nursing rating includes a handful of data points, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these metrics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.