Wood-Lawn Heights

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also performed well in long-term care, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping 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.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. It does not appear that we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. In computing our nursing scores, we look at both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to the fourth category, this facility received an acceptable short-term care rating. Although this is not nearly as good as several of its other scores, this is really not a poor grade. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.