The Oaks at Woodfield

To go along with its strong overall score, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its short-term care rating. In calculating our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A. Our nursing rating analyzes a handful of subcategories, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home also earned excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best grades in that category, with an A-. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home's worst area was long-term care, which is the final area we scored. For this category, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. We want to to draw your attention to this possible weak link, but you should not dwell on one bad category either. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's personal care rather than the highly skilled therapy or medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 87.5 percent of its patients. This is pretty significantly less than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.