Birchwood Plaza

Birchwood Plaza is a large nursing home located in Chicago, Illinois. This isn't a bad facility with a C overall grade. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Chicago. You could definitely do worse than this nursing home. This place did not meet our expectations in every category we looked at, but it did not receive any rock-bottom grades either. More information about its category grades is available below.

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem 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 always a good sign.

Another one of this facility's better category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a B+. It actually performed better than most facilities in this area. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.26063 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. With 1.85 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home was close to average in this area.

The third area we graded was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a C. In determining our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This rating is more often than not a useful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. This nursing home provides a decent amount of services from physical therapists and registered nurses based on our assessment. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 24.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually below the national average.

The last category we analyzed was nursing, is this facility's worst area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. There are numerous factors included in this category. Most of these data points are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged just 2.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.