Park Ridge Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in nursing. We awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing patients and the level of skill of the nurses. 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home was given impressive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our higher grades in that category, with a B+. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest grade. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is typically a useful measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The third category we assessed was long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B. It actually performed better than most nursing homes in this category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.11894 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final category we assessed was inspections. This nursing home did not receive favorable inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave it an F in this category. This ended up pulling down this nursing home's overall score quite a bit. When a place has this poor of an inspection rating, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This facility was assessed 8 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this place received large government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This typically means that a nursing home's poor track record spanned multiple years.