Grand Traverse Pavilions

This nursing home really excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. If it was not for this category, this facility's overall score would have been much lower. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is often a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. The nursing grade considers many subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident more often.

The third area we graded is long-term care, where this facility was given a C in this category. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 98.57434 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This place also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on the final category of inspections, we gave this facility a grade of just D for our inspection category. This proved to be its worst category grade, particularly in light of some of the more impressive scores discussed above. Nevertheless, since the inspection data is compiled by a government inspector, we weight it heavily in our assessment. Inspection ratings factor in many items on the nursing home's inspection reports. If you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is generally the worst sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This facility was assessed 9 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 8 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.