ProMedica Total Rehab+ (Lakewood)

In addition to being a first-rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. The nursing score weighs a number of factors. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 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 place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home also earned impressive government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in that category, with a B. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

The last category we looked at is long-term care, which was a weak link for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in our long-term care category, leaving this as the facility's least impressive category grade. We'd still suggest that you consider all of a facility's category grades. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means the facility did not perform well in our measures relating to patient care. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. We weren't able to find information on vaccination rates. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.