Alden Estates of Evanston

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively minor. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also fared very well in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Not many facilities fared better in this category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a meaningful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home received a strong long-term care score as well. We gave it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B+. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we assessed is nursing, where this facility was given a B-. This ended up being this facility's worst area. This is still nothing to be ashamed of. The nursing rating weighs a variety of factors. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below the national average. Finally, while this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of our quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric.