Lake Forest Place

In addition to being a first-rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an elite grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. With our short-term care grade, we attempt to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

On the list of its many impressive scores, this facility was given an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a score of A in that category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 84.72222 percent of its residents, which is a few points lower than we expected. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We awarded this facility an A for inspections. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the last category we assessed, this facility was given a very strong grade of A in our nursing category. With this score, the facility wrapped up a straight A report card. The nursing grade is based on quite a few data points, most of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients more frequently.