Selfhelp Home of Chicago

Selfhelp Home of Chicago is a small non-profit nursing home in Chicago, Illinois. This turns out to be an A+ rated facility, which is the most impressive score we offer. This is quite a bit better than most of the nursing homes in the city. This nursing home was also given strong ratings in all four of our categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ short-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this area. In our short-term care category, we seek to craft a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides about 50% more services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is a very favorable sign. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it fared as well as just about any facility in the country in this area with 73.3 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this metric.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This score is based on the facility's recent government inspections. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning the page to our next category, this high end nursing home also excelled in the category of long-term care. In this area, we gave it a grade of A+. Very few nursing homes performed better in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the impressive quantity of care provided by aids and other staff at this nursing home, we also were pleased by the facility's record for vaccinations. By way of example, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. The last datapoint we assessed was the nursing home's hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 3.07 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this admittedly wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this area, this statistic can be skewed for some nursing homes due to the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

In the final category we looked at, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility completed a straight A profile. The nursing grade features a number of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility boasts a really impressive 5.1 hours of nursing care per resident each day, of which a significant percentage of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. This is one of the higher totals of nursing hours we found at any facility. In addition to providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also fared well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering falls leading to major injury, this place outpaced the national average. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.