Park Ridge Care Center

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A-. Not many facilities fared better in that category. Our inspection grades are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a score of B+. It performed better than most nursing homes in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the third area, this facility also received a score of B for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a solid measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The final area we assessed is nursing. In that area, we gave this facility a favorable grade of B. The nursing grade weighs a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Illinois in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a resident more often.