Whitehall of Deerfield

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this facility received high marks for short-term care as well. It received our highest grade in that category with an A+. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility also received a strong long-term care score. This actually turned out to be this facility's second strongest category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.947365 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. In determining our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a resident more frequently.

Wrapping up its excellent profile, this nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections, which is based on the facility's recent inspections. We gave it an impressive grade of B+ for that category, which is one of our higher scores. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.