Parkridge Specialty Care

This nursing home really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. If it was not for this area, this facility's overall score would have been much lower. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This score is generally a fair assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that returned home from this nursing home. It fared as well as just about any nursing home with 66.7 percent of its residents returning home. Most places are below 50 percent in this metric.

Another one of this nursing home's stronger areas was in the category of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B. Nursing grades are mostly tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

This facility's inspection grade was yet another category grade that was superior to the nursing home's overall grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a B. Inspection scores are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

The next category we assessed is long-term care. We awarded it a C in that area. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. In determining our long-term care scores, we size up the personal care received by a facility's patients. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, this facility vaccinated just 90 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. This nursing home did not excel here either, with 3.34 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this figure is quite a bit higher than the national average, this statistic can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the medical complexity of patients.