Friendship Village-Schaumburg

In addition to faring well overall, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that area. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Among its many high-end grades, this facility received a strong long-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A- in that category. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 89.3733 percent of its residents. This is a few points lower than we were hoping for. Clearly, this place 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Finishing off its excellent profile, this nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our higher scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.