Covenant Medical Center Michigan

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This exemplary nursing home also performed well in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A+. Very few facilities performed better in this category. Our short-term care grades are believed to be more meaningful for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility 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. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 7.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We gave this nursing home a grade of A for inspections. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The last category we assessed is long-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of B-. Although this proved to be its weakest category grade, this is nevertheless not a terrible score. Our long-term care scores are based on the nursing home's quantity of nursing services. This means a vast range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. We were not able to find information on vaccination rates. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.