North Woods Nursing Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 99.481865 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also was superb in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most meaningful for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. In computing our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning residents at least once a day.

In addition, this facility also received a nearly flawless government inspection. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A. With this impressive grade, this place is one of the few facilities in Michigan to earn straight A's. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.