Lewis & Clark Gardens

Lewis & Clark Gardens is a large nursing home located in Saint Charles, Missouri. With an overall rating of F, we consider this to be a lower end nursing home. This nursing home is just about as bad as it gets. We wouldn't blame you if you're ready to stop reading and find another facility. However, if you want to learn more about this nursing home's category grades, inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We were also pleasantly surprised to find that this nursing home received a reasonably solid long-term care grade this year. We gave it a C in this area. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's assistance with daily living instead of the highly skilled nursing or medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 91.31579 percent of its patients. This is a bit below what we expected but still a decent percentage. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 2.64 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this number can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. The nursing grade is based on a handful of datapoints, however, the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 2.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. On top of its below average nursing hour totals, this place received poor marks in several of the quality-based measures we considered in computing our nursing grades. We found that a higher percentage of this nursing home's residents suffered falls leading to serious injury.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in that area. Short-term care grades are generally employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 28.2 percent of its residents returning home.