Burcham Hills Retirement Center

On top of earning a strong overall grade, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We awarded them one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of A. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more critical for individuals needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. Our nursing score considers a number of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also gave this facility a solid score in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of B-. In the area of long-term care, we analyze the quantity of services provided by a nursing home, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to the final category of inspections, this was not one of this facility's better grades. Inspection grades are based on a facility's recent government inspections. We gave this facility a C in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This indicates this facility avoided the more significant categories of deficiencies. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.