River Crossing of Alton

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a score of B-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an D. In calculating a facility's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for patients and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is slightly below the national average. Unfortunately, this facility also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.

We gave this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care score. This is not an impressive grade. In our short-term care assessment, we strive to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a facility's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. With a grade in this range for this area, we were not stunned to find this place was below average in two of the key staffing metrics we assess. It provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This place fared better in this area, with 50.9 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to our fourth category, this nursing home didn't perform well here either. Due to a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is really as bad as it gets. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 79.29824 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.45 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.