Medilodge of Sterling

Medilodge of Sterling is located in Sterling, Michigan. This nursing home proved to be a grade A facility, which is a high-end grade. We were so impressed with this nursing home that we ranked it in the top 20 percent of all facilities in the United States. Headlining this nursing home's remarkable report card is its nursing score, which is addressed in the next section.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing rating weighs many factors, but the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provides an incredible 4.5 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. In addition to providing high levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. It performed as well as any nursing home in the nation in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. This is based on the nursing home's government inspections. Inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's inspections. Places that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility received a strong grade of A in our short-term care category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. One reason for this facility's strong grade in this area is it offers more care from registered nurses than a typical nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. This place outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 57.6 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

The last area we graded is this nursing home's worst area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a respectable grade of B- in our long-term care category. In calculating our long-term care ratings, we size up the personal care offered to a facility's residents. On top of offering above average levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 98.42519 percent of its residents. This figure is better than most nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.89 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.