Manor Care Health Services - Wheaton

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it was awarded a very positive short-term care grade. Indeed, this wound up being its second best category score. In this area, we awarded this facility a B+. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The third area we graded is long-term care. This facility was given a favorable long-term care grade, with a grade of B+ in this category. For patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 76.98745 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we were hoping for. Clearly, this facility 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 an impressively low number.

Our final category is nursing, in which we awarded this nursing home a C in this area. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we like to look at quality-based metrics, such as the percentage of patients who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these data points are indicators of the quality of nursing care.