The Willows at Okemos

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility received an A+ in our short-term care category. Our short-term care grades are probably more meaningful for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Nursing scores are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident at least once a day.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home was awarded an extremely favorable long-term care grade. Even though this is not quite as dominant as some of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our better grades we offer. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 94.88637 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.