Mount Carmel Senior Living - O'fallon

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Building on its strong performance in other categories, we awarded this facility an B for nursing. Nursing scores are primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our higher grades in our long-term care category as well, with a B. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 93.85965 percent of its residents. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to the last area, this nursing home was given an acceptable short-term care score of B-. Short-term care grades are crucial for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. It doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.