Grace Care Center at Northpointe

This facility earned a strong overall score as mentioned above, but we wanted to point out its excellent long-term care score. We awarded them an A+ in this category. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 93.12977 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be a few points less than we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this facility 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.

We also want to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless government inspections recently. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing rating weighs many factors, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The last category we rated is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is an abysmal grade. You should not simply disregard a nursing home because of a single bad score though. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. It appears that this nursing home was subpar in multiple staffing metrics we assessed. In fact, it provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.