Sunterra Springs Dardenne Prairie

While we gave this nursing home a poor overall grade, we gave it a fairly respectable grade in the area of inspections, where it received a B-. This was quite a bit better than its other categories. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of those deficiencies. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses are with residents and the level of skill of those nurses. This place provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

This facility received its third highest category grade in the category of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a B- in this category, which is a respectable score. In our short-term care category, we seek to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. It supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The final category we assessed was long-term care, which turned out to be a low point for this facility. We gave this nursing home a grade of D for the area of long-term care. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted information about vaccinations. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.