Providence Downers Grove

On top of earning a strong overall score, this nursing home also earned an elite short-term care grade. We gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with an A. Short-term care grades are often used to score a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Turning to another one of this nursing home's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection rating. Inspections turned out to be one of its best categories. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Our nursing rating is based on many factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility 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 generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility's weakest area is long-term care, which is the last category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category. Even with a few impressive grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless somewhat of a concern so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care may not provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities offer. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated 89.53975 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is quite a few points lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.