Medilodge of Traverse City

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it earned an impressive nursing grade. In this category, we gave this facility an A. There are many criteria within this grade. Most of the criteria reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident more frequently.

Adding to its first-rate assessments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A for its short-term care score. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home received a very good inspection report this year as well. For this reason, it received one of our higher grades in that category with a B. Inspection grades are tied to datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. A deficiency-free inspection report is definitely the goal.

The next category we looked at was long-term care. We awarded this facility one of our higher grades in this category, with a B. Although this isn't on par with many of this facility's other grades, it is nevertheless a positive score. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 97.807014 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.