South County Nursing Home

South County Nursing Home is a nursing home located in Arnold, Missouri, a city with a total of 35,439 people. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of B, which is a quality grade. You can definitely do much worse than this place. Fortunately, this place didn't have any poor grades in any of the four major categories. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections is its best category grade. In that area, we awarded it an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no 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 safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also was awarded a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for the nursing home population. The last datapoint we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. We found that this nursing home had 3.41 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this admittedly wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this area, this statistic may be skewed for some nursing homes based on the medical complexity of residents.

The next area we rated was short-term care. We awarded it a B- in that category. This is a decent grade in this area. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final metric we considered in this area is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 16.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.