The Willows at East Lansing

The Willows at East Lansing is one of four available nursing homes in East Lansing, Michigan. Sporting an overall grade of B+, this nursing home should work for most prospective patients. Based on the data we reviewed, you can do much worse than this facility. This facility's strong report card was highlighted by its short-term care score, which you can find in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this facility also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received an elite grade of A+. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is often a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered substantially more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. It outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 67.3 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A. Nursing grades are primarily based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 3.7 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Approximately a quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are among the most skilled nurses. This is an impressive percentage of skilled nursing care. We weight these hours performed by skilled nurses more in determining our nursing ratings. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home 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 avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a resident at least once a day.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection rating. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite 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.

This nursing home's worst area was long-term care, which is the last category we assessed. In this category, we awarded this facility a D. We would like to to draw your attention to this possible area of weakness, but you should not dwell on a single bad area either. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.36306 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 1.07 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.