Fair Oaks Health Care Center

Fair Oaks Health Care Center is one of a mere three available nursing homes located in Crystal Lake, Illinois. This facility is ranked among the highest-rated facilities we assessed. In fact, it received the absolute highest grade. We were not surprised to discover that this is actually the best nursing home in Crystal Lake. If you scroll down, you can see this place's category ratings, which are also strong.

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Short-term care grades are vital for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This nursing home excelled in two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it provided about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the nation in this area with 71.6 percent of its patients returning home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In determining a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses commit to patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This particular facility provided 5.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This was one of the better figures we found. In addition, we found that a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of providing high levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. For example, it performed as well as any nursing home in the nation in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.

Adding to an already impressive profile, this facility also received virtually flawless health inspections in recent years. As a result, we awarded it an A+ inspection grade. Inspection grades are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

The last category we looked at is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B+. This finished off a very impressive profile. Few facilities earned a B+ or higher in every single category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to offering very favorable levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.