Lasalle Nursing Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

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. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. 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.

The third best area we gave this facility in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. In forming our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. We were not able to find registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we graded turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still awarded it a decent grade of C in nursing. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Finally, we also factored some quality measures into our nursing scores. This nursing home was relatively weak in a few of the major metrics we look at, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are usually reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided.