Covenant Village of the Great Lakes

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned a very impressive short-term care grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an impressive grade of A. Short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

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. Nursing scores are primarily based on a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

Moving on to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that category, which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS 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 deficiencies are not the end of the world.

The final area we looked at was long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home an acceptable grade of C. This actually proved to be this facility's worst category. With our long-term care assessment, we look at the quantity of care offered by a facility, along with a series of qualitative statistics. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.