Novi Lakes Health Campus

To go along with its favorable overall performance, we gave this facility an A for the area of inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B. In determining our nursing scores, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient even once per day.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable short-term care scores this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of B. Our short-term care grade is typically used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last category we assessed was long-term care. We gave it a grade of C in that category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 93.97591 percent of its residents. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.