Aperion Care Oak Lawn

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a C for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This facility was hit with 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were in categories G through L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

Sadly, we gave this facility an F for its long-term care grade. Facilities that don't fare well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 38.58921 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.05 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

In addition, we gave this facility an F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, where this facility was given a bottom of the barrel grade here as well. Sadly, it received an F for this category, which is definitely very concerning. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Based on its score in this area, we weren't stunned to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.5 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below average.