Medilodge of Lansing

Although we did not rate this nursing home well overall, we want to acknowledge it received a decent grade of B- in the area of nursing. We weighed the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

This facility's next highest category turned out to be short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. In forming our short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.

This nursing home received slightly below average government inspections in recent years. We gave them a C in this area. Our inspection scores are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This place was hit with 7 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home was given a C in long-term care, which we consider to be a respectable rating. Long-term care grades assess a nursing home's personal care rather than the skilled therapy and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.