Colonial Nursing Center of Rockford

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively solid inspections in recent years. We gave it a B in this area, which was much better than its overall score. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that had too many deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We also gave this facility a strong grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B. This is better than most nursing homes in this category. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses are caring for patients and the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving residents at least once a day.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a decent grade of C. In the area of long-term care, we focus on the amount of services offered by a nursing home, as opposed to more sophisticated services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. As it turns out, this facility vaccinated just 78.49462 percent of its residents, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last area we scored is short-term care, which is a weak spot for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a D in the area of short-term care. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is often a solid assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a score of this caliber in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this facility was below average in the two key staffing metrics we assess. In fact, it supplied substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.