The Carriage House of Bay City

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing actually ended up being its best category. In that category, we awarded this facility an A. The nursing rating includes a number of datapoints. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to its impressive profile, this facility also performed at a high level in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that area with an B+. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor dings aren't necessarily something to panic about.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B+. It outperformed most facilities in this category. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 4.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The last category we assessed was long-term care. We gave this facility a decent score in that category, with a grade of C. While this isn't on par with several of this nursing home's other scores, it is still not a poor grade. In the category of long-term care, we focus on the amount of services provided by a nursing home, rather than more healthcare-oriented services. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 96.323524 percent of its residents, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. This nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.