Berrien Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility really excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Very few facilities performed more favorably in this category. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.93617 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's third most favorable category is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. Our short-term care scores are arguably more important for residents in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Moving on to the fourth category, this nursing home was awarded a decent nursing rating. Even though this was not nearly as impressive as a few of its other grades, this is truly not a poor grade. Our nursing score assesses several data points, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared well in this subcategory. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident even once per day.