Symphony of Chesterton

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A-. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients even once per day.

We also wanted to point out this facility's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them a grade of B+ in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem 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 leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The last category we assessed was long-term care, which turned out to be a low point for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a D in long-term care, leaving this as the facility's weakest category. We'd nevertheless suggest that you consider all of a facility's category grades. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.