Forest Park Health Campus

This facility received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially would like to point out its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite short-term care grade. It received one of our best grades in that category, with a score of A-. Short-term care grades are typically employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing grade consists of quite a few components, but the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The last category we assessed was long-term care. We gave this nursing home a D in long-term care, leaving this as the facility's weakest area. For residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.