Elderwood at Hamburg

This facility received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially want to point out its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Another strong feature for this nursing home is that it was given a very positive short-term care score. Indeed, this ended up being its second best category score. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. Our short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing rating assesses many subcategories, but the paramount one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below average. Lastly, although this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of our quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this metric.

The last category we looked at was long-term care, which is this facility's least impressive area. It received an F for this area, which is clearly a bit of a disappointment. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 98.870056 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.