Wellbridge of Novi

This nursing home really excelled in the area of short-term care, where it earned an A-. Few facilities fared better in this category. If it wasn't for this grade, this facility's overall grade would have been much lower. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. We weighed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 Michigan in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a resident at least once a day.

This facility's inspection rating was yet another category grade that was superior to the facility's overall grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a B. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

This facility's least impressive category is long-term care, which is the last area we scored. For this category, we awarded this nursing home an D. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.23077 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.