West Bloomfield Health & Rehabilitation Center

In addition to earning a great overall score, this facility excelled at short-term care. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. In crafting our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave them one of our more favorable scores in our long-term care category as well, with a B+. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. 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 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our last category, this facility also was awarded an excellent nursing grade, with a grade of B+. This completed a very favorable report card. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, 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 data points as good measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.