Grace Care Center at Northpointe

While we were fairly low on this facility overall, we awarded it a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall score. Our inspection grades weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with a bunch of severe deficiencies flagged. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of C. Nursing ratings are largely based on a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most facilities. Finally, our nursing grades also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next highest score is long-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this category, it still performed somewhat badly. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to resident care. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 85.98131 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be several points less than what we expected. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The final category we analyzed was short-term care. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in that category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. With its grade in this area, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.7 percent of its patients returning home.