River Oaks Care Center

With an address in Steele, Missouri, River Oaks Care Center is the sole nursing home we identified in this city. This nursing home proved to be a respectable facility, with an overall grade of C. Based on our assessment, there are certainly much worse nursing homes out there. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's report card is its stellar inspection reports, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place really excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Turning to the category of long-term care, we gave this facility a grade of A in that category. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. We found that this place had 3.9 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this wasn't as favorable as some of its other scores in this area, this statistic may be skewed for some nursing homes due to some of the medical complexity of residents.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this nursing home an D. Our nursing rating weighs a handful of datapoints, but the primary 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. This place also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite concerning when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a poor nursing score.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care. It received a lowly F for this category, which is a poor grade. This is clearly a significant disappointment. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. With a grade in this range in this area, we were not surprised to find this place was below average in several staffing areas we assess. In fact, it provided far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 21 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.