Preferred Care at Hamilton Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an D. There are a number of criteria within this area. Many of the datapoints relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This number is far below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its long-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning to our last category, this nursing home really did not fare well in this area either. With a poor grade of F in short-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. Our short-term care grades are arguably more critical for individuals in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With its grade in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.