North Starr Postacute Care

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing score weighs many subcategories, however, the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we gave this nursing home an A- for inspections. Our inspection ratings are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Places that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The third category we graded was short-term care. This nursing home was awarded an above average short-term care score, with a grade of B+ in the category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is often a reliable measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The final area we rated was long-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B+. This topped off an elite report card. Very few nursing homes received a B+ or better in every category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.