Oak Trace

Oak Trace is a small non-profit nursing home located in Downers Grove, Illinois. This facility is one of the most elite nursing homes we assessed. A grade of this caliber requires superb scores across the board. We rated this facility as one of the 100 best nursing homes in Illinois, which is a distinguished list. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's exemplary report card is its inspection rating. We discuss inspections in the next section.

We also wanted to point out that this nursing home earned near flawless government inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You can't go wrong with a deficiency-free inspection report.

This nursing home also was awarded an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few facilities to be given more than one A+ category grades. In computing these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This nursing home excelled in two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it supplied about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical facility. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 69.9 percent of its patients returning home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. There are numerous subcategories within this grade. Most of these factors reflect levels of nurse staffing. This place provided 5.2 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the higher totals in the country. A significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We are really impressed by both of these figures. On top of offering high levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in Illinois when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The last area we looked at is long-term care. We gave this facility one of our more favorable scores in this area, with a grade of B. Even though this is not as favorable as some of this facility's other grades, it is still an excellent score. For residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.