Traverse Care Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it an A-. Inspection scores are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that category, we gave this facility an B. Nursing scores are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 2.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as good measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

This facility also was awarded a positive short-term care score. Indeed, we gave them a B in that category, which is one of our better. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of care from registered nurses to its residents. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next area we graded was long-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Naturally, this grade pulled down the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 85.91549 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be significantly below average. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.