Sunterra Springs Springfield

In addition to performing well overall, this facility received even higher grades in the area of short-term care. It earned one of our highest scores in that area with an A. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 6.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Missouri in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a resident even once per day.

We also wanted to point out this nursing home's nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find deficiency data for this facility. We would like to have more data for this facility. Without information regarding deficiencies, it was a challenge to grade it in this area.

The next category we assessed ended up being this facility's poorest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of C for our long-term care category. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this nursing home submitted data regarding vaccinations. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.