Lutheran Senior Services at Meramec Bluffs

To pair with its strong overall grade, we gave this place an A+ for our inspection category. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. The nursing rating considers numerous factors. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This particular nursing home provided 0.9 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving patients more frequently.

Turning the page to our next area, we gave this facility a grade of A for its long-term care grade. This is a dominant grade. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 96.55173 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category we scored, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of A in our short-term care category. With this score, the facility wrapped up a straight A report card. Short-term care grades are generally employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.