La Salle County Nursing Home

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections is its best category grade. In that category, we awarded it a grade of A-. Our inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area usually have few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home is also above average in the category of long-term care, where it was given a score of B+. It performed more favorably than most facilities in this category. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 72.916664 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave them one of our more positive scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is typically a reliable assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The last category we rated was nursing. This facility was awarded a B- for the category. We analyzed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also baked some quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This nursing home was subpar in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are usually decent measures of the quality of nursing care offered.