Oaks at Northpointe

To pair with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this facility a grade of A- for its inspection grade. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

We also awarded this facility a positive grade in short-term care. This facility received a grade of B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care grades are meaningful for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. It does not appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility also was given a positive long-term care grade. In fact, we gave them a B in that area, which happens to be one of our better. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we scored is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor score. This is clearly a major disappointment. We looked at the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.