Siskin Hospital for Rehabilitation

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that 7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Another strength for this nursing home is long-term care, where it was given an A+ rating. This is just about as good as it gets in this area. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are well cared for. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the next area, this facility received an extremely favorable nursing grade. In fact, we gave it an A in this category, rounding out a straight A profile. In calculating a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses are seeing residents as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as good indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.