Houghton Co Med Care Facility

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its elite achievements in other areas, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for its short-term care score. Short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 4.6 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Contributing to its fine assessment, this facility also received a dominant long-term care score, with a grade of A-. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category we scored, this nursing home was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the facility finished off a straight A profile. In computing our nursing grades, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.