Avantara Lake Zurich

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. It outperformed the overwhelming majority of facilities with 68 percent of its residents returning home.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. Inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area typically have very few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. In calculating our nursing scores, we analyze both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Roughly one-fourth of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are among the most skilled levels of nurses. This is an impressive ratio of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours performed by these types of nurses more in computing our nursing ratings. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 Illinois 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 employing a protocol of turning a patient at least once a day.

The last area we graded was long-term care. We awarded this facility one of our higher scores in this area, with a grade of B. This nursing home ended up being strong in each area we assessed. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 66.02871 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.