Ssm Health St Clare Meadows Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In this area, we awarded this facility an A. There are several subcategories included in this grade. Most of the criteria reflect staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

To complement its dominant achievements in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A- for our short-term care rating. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more critical for residents requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Racking up another strong category grade, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The fourth area we looked at was long-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very strong report card. Very few facilities earned a B+ or higher in every single category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.02913 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.