Steelville Senior Living

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we did give it an excellent grade in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Our inspection ratings are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. The lack of deficiencies is this nursing home's greatest accomplishment.

Unfortunately, this facility only earned a D for its short-term care score, which is actually one of its more favorable category scores. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home.

This facility's second lowest category was long-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a relatively poor score. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 95.652176 percent of its patients, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The next area we analyzed was nursing. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is a very poor grade. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percentage of patients suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers could be avoided with better nursing care. This metric helped pull down this facility's nursing score quite a bit.