Northshore Extended Care Hospital

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection ratings are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. It doesn't look like we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Without having access to all of the deficiency related data for this nursing home, it ended up being challenging to fully evaluate it in this area.

This nursing home also fared very well in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Very few facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most critical for patients requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our nursing score is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Switching gears to our final area, this nursing home was given a high-end long-term care score. Although this was not nearly as elite as several of its other scores, this remains one of our stronger scores we offer. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective 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 residents. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We weren't able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.