Elevate Care Riverwoods

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B for our short-term care score. Our short-term care grades are important for prospective residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This means a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

We also wanted to point out this nursing home's decent health inspections in recent years. We gave it somewhat respectable grade of C in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. This facility was assessed 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were category G through L deficiencies. This tells you that this facility avoided the more serious classes of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

This facility was awarded its next best category grade in the category of long-term care. We gave this facility a C in this category, which is a respectable grade. Our long-term care grade assesses a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the skilled therapy or healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 68.23956 percent of its residents, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we assessed was nursing, which proved to be a weak link for this facility. We gave this nursing home a grade of D for the area of nursing. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this category. 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. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.