Heritage Health-Elgin

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility has received near flawless health inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection scores are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this area. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable short-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave it one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a score of B+. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This category is generally a reliable measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final area we rated is nursing, in which this nursing home was given a B. This actually was this nursing home's least impressive category. A nursing home is doing something right when it's lowest score still outperforms most facilities. There are a host of data points included in this category. Most of these criteria are tied to staffing levels. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.