Grace Care Center at Northpointe

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Additionally, we also would like to note that this facility received favorable long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a B. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest grade. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 82.700424 percent of its patients. This is somewhat lower than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. When determining our nursing grades, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients at least once a day.

The next area we rated was short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is clearly a major disappointment. Our short-term care grades are critical for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing. This means a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. With a grade this poor for this area, we were not stunned to learn that this nursing home was well below average in several staffing figures we assess. The facility supplied far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.