Kalkaska Memorial Health Center

Located in Kalkaska, Michigan, Kalkaska Memorial Health Center is the sole nursing home we identified in the city. We gave this facility an overall grade of B+. A score of this caliber requires solid marks in most areas. We also want to point out that this place is based in a hospital. Typically, this indicates that more intensive medical services are offered. This nursing home's impressive profile was highlighted by its nursing score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

To pair with its strong overall score, we gave this nursing home an A for our nursing rating. There are many criteria within this category. Many of these factors relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This place provided 4.6 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the better figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We are very impressed by these figures. On top of offering high levels of care, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality measures we assessed. In terms of the number of its patients suffering falls resulting in serious injury, this place performed as well as any nursing home the nation.

This facility really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of facilities performed more favorably in this area. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. This place outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation in this area with 57.3 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility also earned top notch government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of A-. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings are not something to panic about.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care, which proved to be a weak spot for this nursing home. We gave this facility a D in the area of long-term care, making this the facility's least impressive area. We would nevertheless recommend that you consider all of a nursing home's grades. For prospective patients in need of a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After assessing nursing hours and other staffing provided by this nursing home, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Due to its grade in this category, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that this facility performed reasonably well both subcategories. In fact, this facility vaccinated 99.411766 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.74 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.