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. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Nursing grades are largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this facility also was awarded favorable long-term care grades this year. Indeed, we gave it one of our better grades in that area, with a score of B+. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 93.82023 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points lower than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Lastly, we wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless inspections. We gave them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.