Aperion Care Highwood

While we were not complementary of this place's overall performance, it actually received an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that area with a B+. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of C. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing patients as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This facility averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is not an impressive total. Lastly, our nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care grade. This is well below average in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This score is more often than not a reliable assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Based on its score in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the figures we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected to find. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a poor grade. Nursing homes that don't score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 91.60839 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.