Aperion Care Forest Park

Neither this facility's overall grade nor its category scores gave us anything positive to point out. Its best category was short-term care, but even there it received a D. This is still a poor score. Our short-term care scores are thought to be most critical for individuals needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this place offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5.1 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this nursing home's inspection grades where it received an F. This generally means we found some red flags on the inspection reports. For places with poor inspection grades, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This nursing home had 7 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also want to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently of over $100,000. This usually indicates that a facility'spoor performance spanned several years.

This facility ended up receiving rock bottom score in our nursing category. It received an F in this category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses commit to residents and the levels of training of the nurses. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This place fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The final area we looked at is long-term care. We gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is a rock bottom grade. Nursing homes that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were concerned by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated just 54.416405 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.