Baptist Health La Grange

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing ratings are tied to nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides an incredible 8.2 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to offering high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. It performed as well as any facility in the country when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

We also wanted to note the fact that this nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. We gave them an exemplary score of A+ in this area. Our short-term care scores are probably most critical for residents needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is that it offers more than seven hours of care per week from registered nurses per patient. This is really the gold standard in this metric, as it's roughly 50% higher than a typical place's level of registered nurse staffing. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the nation in this area with 64.4 percent of its residents returning home. Most places are below 50 percent in this metric.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to the last area, this nursing home also was awarded an A+ long-term care score, leaving it as one of just a handful of nursing homes to achieve straight A+'s. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.