Advantage Living Center - Battle Creek

Even though we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we gave it a grade of B- for short-term care. Our short-term care grades are arguably more critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

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 D. 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 offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

Among this facility's alarming category grades was an F for its inspection grade. More often than not, this means we found some red flags on the facility's inspection reports. With facilities that received this bad of an inspection score, we would scrutinize any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This nursing home was assessed multiple category G through L deficiencies, which are among the more serious deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by the government inspectors had potential to cause actual harm to patients. Another red flag is that CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home didn't fare well here either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as as uninspiring as it gets. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. On top of considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 90.867584 percent of its residents. This is significantly lower than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.