Brookdale Burr Ridge

In addition to earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home fared well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. In the area of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it an A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. This is one of the few facilities with an overall score in this range which received multiple category grades this high. Our inspection grades are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

Moving on to the next category, this nursing home really did not perform well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category, this is clearly this facility's weakest area. Nursing homes that don't fare well in this category typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. We were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to only 83.333336 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.