Garden View Care Center at Dougherty Ferry

With an address in Valley Park, Missouri, Garden View Care Center at Dougherty Ferry is one of a mere two nursing homes in the city. This nursing home proved to be a grade A facility, which is a truly elite score. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top 20 percent of all nursing homes in the country. If you scroll down, you will see this facility's category ratings, which are just as strong as its overall score.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to point out the fact that this nursing home was given an impressive score of A- in our short-term care category. Short-term care grades are critical for people seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that it outperformed the majority of facilities in this area with 55.4 percent of its patients returning home. This is a better rate than most nursing homes.

The fourth category we graded was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded an A-. This finished off a very favorable report card. Very few nursing homes earned an A- or higher in in each area we assessed. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.