Chalet of Niles

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of nursing. We awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's next best area turned out to be its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of B-. Short-term care grades are crucial for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home's next best category turned out to be its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a C. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's personal care rather than the skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on our final category of inspections, this nursing home received a terrible grade. With an F in the inspection category, this nursing home's overall grade was pulled down significantly. For nursing homes with bad inspection scores, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This facility was assessed one category G through L deficiency, which are among the more severe categories of deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies identified by inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. Lastly, we would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines recently amounting to more than $100,000. This generally indicates that a poor track record has been an issue for more than one year.