​Elwood Care Center & Assisted Living

To go along with its strong overall performance, we gave this place an A for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home fared well in the category of long-term care. In fact, we gave it a score of A- for that area, which happens to be one of our most dominant scores. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 80.50848 percent of its patients. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a grade of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this area. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is typically a solid measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The final category we scored was nursing, in which this facility received a grade of B-. While this turned out to be its worst category grade, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. Our nursing rating is based on several subcategories, but the main consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this subcategory. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident more often.