Northbrook Manor Care Center

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in this category with an A. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Building on this nursing home's list of strengths, it also earned an excellent nursing grade. We gave them an impressive grade of C in this category. Our nursing rating is largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility received a grade of just D in that area. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care, which is this facility's least impressive area. We awarded this nursing home a D in that category. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a fair measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With a grade of this caliber for this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this nursing home was well below average in multiple staffing metrics we focus on. It supplied far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.8 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below average.