Advantage Living Center - Battle Creek

While this place's overall grade was abysmal, it didn't perform terribly in our short-term care rating. In fact, we gave it a B- for that category, which is a decent score. That said, this was not enough to salvage its otherwise poor profile. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The final item we considered in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an C. Our nursing grade is based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is well below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this area. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving patients at least once a day.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this nursing home's inspection grades where it received an F. This generally means we found some red flags on the inspection reports. For facilities with bad inspection ratings, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This nursing home was assessed several category G through L deficiencies, which are among the more serious categories of deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies found by the government inspectors had the potential to create actual harm to patients. We are also concerned by the fact that this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, where this facility was given a poor score here also. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category, which is obviously very concerning. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinates 95.77465 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.