The Villa at Traverse Point

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent grade in our short-term care category, where it received an A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. This helped its overall profile to a degree. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is often a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Surprisingly, this facility actually received an impressive nursing grade this year as well. We gave it a grade of B in this category. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also wanted to point out this nursing home's inspection grade where it received a lowly F. For places with poor inspection scores, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This particular facility had 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they created a threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also need to point out that this facility received significant government fines in recent years amounting to over $100,000. This often means that a facility's poor performance spanned multiple years.

The final area we graded was long-term care, in which this facility received a very poor score here as well. We gave it an F for this area, which is definitely very concerning. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.