Lexington of Lake Zurich

Lexington of Lake Zurich is a very-large nursing home located in Lake Zurich, Illinois. It looks like this is a quality facility. We gave this it an overall grade of B+, which is a well above average rating. We actually rated it as the best facility in Lake Zurich. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its short-term care grade, which you can find in the next section.

We also found that this nursing home excelled at short-term care. We awarded them an elite grade of A+ in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is generally a meaningful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. It outperformed the vast majority of facilities with 73.6 percent of its residents returning home. This is a much higher rate than most facilities.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an A. In determining a facility's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This facility provides an impressive 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Of this total, more than one quarter of these hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most skilled levels of nurses. We add more weight to hours worked by skilled nurses in determining our nursing scores. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home's worst area was long-term care, which is the final category we assessed. For this area, we awarded this facility a grade of D. We wanted to draw your attention to this potential weak link, but you shouldn't focus exclusively on a single area either. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category likely don't provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other nursing homes offer. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 88.801575 percent of its patients. This is multiple points lower than the national average. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 1.06 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.