Life Care Center of St Louis

While we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to draw your attention to its relatively favorable short-term care grade. We gave it a respectable grade of B in this area. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is more often than not a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home, which as an area this facility performed much more favorably. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 60.5 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Shockingly, this nursing home actually received a good grade in inspections as well. In fact, we gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Few nursing homes that were this poor overall earned multiple category grades of this caliber. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid places that had a long list of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of C. We scrutinized the levels of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this area. This particular nursing home provided just 2.7 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Finally, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The next category we looked at was long-term care, which turned out to be a weak spot for this facility. We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care category. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 94.0171 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home also wasn't as bad as we expected at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Although it had 1.88 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was not bad due to it having more complicated patients.