Alden Estates of Skokie

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this nursing home received superb marks in the area of short-term care. Consequently, it received one of our best grades in that category with a grade of A+. In the area of short-term care, we seek to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our nursing grade is based on many subcategories, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents even once per day.

In the last area, we gave this facility an A+ for its long-term care score. This completed an elite profile. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.