Elgin Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in this category with an A. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was awarded a strong long-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it one of our most favorable grades in this category with a grade of A-. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Sadly, this facility only earned a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not a very good score. Our short-term care scores are arguably more important for folks in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 6.1 percent of its residents returning home.

The last category we looked at was nursing, which was this nursing home's least impressive category. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is obviously very disappointing. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. 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. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.