Medilodge of Rogers City

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this critical area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its dominant performance in other areas, we gave this facility a grade of A for our short-term care rating. In the category of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. There are many datapoints included in this grade. Most of these datapoints reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

The last category we looked at is long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded an A. This finished off an elite profile. Only a select few nursing homes earned an A- or better in in each area we assessed. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.66355 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.