Fair Oaks Health Care Center

On top of earning a great overall score, this nursing home also received an A+ in short-term care. Short-term care grades are commonly used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. The nursing grade analyzes several subcategories, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Illinois in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents at least once a day.

This facility also earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our best scores in that area, with a score of A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

The last area we rated is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our higher scores in this category, with a B. While this isn't as favorable as several of this facility's other scores, it is nevertheless an excellent score. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.