The Valley-a Stonebridge Community

The Valley-a Stonebridge Community is an average-sized nursing home located in Florissant, Missouri. This facility was given an F, which is really a bottom of the barrel score in our grading scheme. If you aren't happy with this facility's overall grade, you should be able to find a better option in Florissant. The city has at least 10 other nursing homes. Despite all this, one of the few highlights of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection score. You can continue reading to find out about inspections and other category grades

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually performed pretty well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home also didn't grade out poorly in the category of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of C in that category, which turned out to be another one of its more favorable grades. In calculating our long-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's personal care services. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to only 69.44444 percent of its residents. Finally, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. This facility did not excel here either, with 5.93 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this statistic may be skewed for some facilities based on the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses are with patients as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal marks in several of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in this metric. This is quite concerning when you consider that so many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a weak nursing grade.

The next area we rated was short-term care. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is generally a useful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. With its weak grade in this category, we were not shocked to learn that this facility provides significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 16.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.