North Aurora Care Center

Although we gave this facility an abysmal overall grade, we gave it a B- for our nursing category. Our nursing score considers a number of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most other nursing homes. Lastly, our nursing ratings also consider quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

We were also surprised to discover that this facility received a reasonably solid short-term care grade in our assessment. We awarded it a grade of C in that area. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to craft a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The critical question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Unfortunately, this facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We gave it a grade of just D for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. This particular facility had 5 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we also would like to point out that this facility was assessed significant government fines in recent years of over $100,000. This typically indicates that a facility's poor track record has been an issue for more than one year.

The final category we rated was long-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this category, which is an abysmal grade. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the nursing home is not as well-staffed. One of the data points we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to a relatively low 86.56716 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.