Memorial Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we weren't able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive more than one A+ category grades. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more critical for patients needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home excelled at the highest level in the two key staffing areas we assessed. The facility offered about 50% more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than a typical nursing home. This is a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy staffing, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 68.2 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provided 6.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This was one of the higher totals we found. In addition, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. These are both really impressive figures. On top of offering high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed as well as any nursing home in Illinois in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Switching gears to the last area, this facility was awarded a highly favorable long-term care rating. We awarded it a grade of A in this area, giving this facility straight A's. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home'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 patients. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. It does not appear that this nursing home submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.