Deerfield Crossing Northbrook

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than its overall rating. Our inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category 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 facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a positive score in long-term care. This nursing home earned a grade of B+ in this area, which happens to be one of our more impressive scores. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best area ended up being short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a B-. Short-term care scores are meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

This facility's weakest category was nursing, which is the last area we assessed. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category. Despite several acceptable grades in other areas, this grade is nevertheless concerning so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. There are quite a few criteria within this category. Many of the factors are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is not a very impressive figure. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.