Bronson Commons

Bronson Commons is the lone option we identified in Mattawan, Michigan. Featuring an overall grade of A, this facility is one of the best nursing homes we assessed. We couldn't find many negative things to say about this place. Its ratings are impeccable. Headlining this nursing home's stellar report card is its short-term care score, which is addressed in the next section.

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ in short-term care. In our short-term care grade, we attempt to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in the nation in this area with 66.5 percent of its patients returning home.

In addition, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that category with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few relatively minor dings are not something to panic about.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. In determining our nursing scores, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home boasts a really impressive 4.6 hours of nursing care per resident daily, of which a significant portion was provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality measures we looked at. With less than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers could be avoided by offering better nursing care and having a policy of moving patients at least once a day.

The last area we graded was long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B-. Although this ended up being its worst category score, this is nevertheless not a poor grade. In the category of long-term care, we weigh the amount of care offered by a facility, rather than more sophisticated services. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 91.66667 percent of its patients. This is somewhat less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.