West Suburban Hospital Med Center

To pair with a strong overall score, we awarded this place a grade of A+ for our inspection category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its first-rate profile, this facility also was awarded a strong short-term care grade, with a score of A. Our short-term care scores are important for individuals seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 7.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home was given an impressive long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that category with a score of B+. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. We were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we graded is nursing, where this nursing home was given a grade of B-. This proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. This is nevertheless not the end of the world. The nursing score includes many factors. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided just 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning residents even once per day.