Thrive of Fox Valley

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we have deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was awarded a first-rate grade of A in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also was elite in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A. Few nursing homes received a better grade in this category. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to locate information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final category we looked at, this facility was given a very strong grade of A- in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility topped off a straight A report card. There are many factors included in this category. Many of the data points reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.