Golden Years Nursing Center

Golden Years Nursing Center is just one of 11 possibilities in Hamilton, Ohio. We gave this facility a B- overall, which is a decent grade. This is comparable with the city grade in Hamilton, which is a B. In our view, this facility would be a good fit for quite a few people. One of the major highlights of this nursing home's profile is its stellar inspection grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we gave it a superb long-term care grade. In fact, we gave this nursing home a score of A-. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 85.18519 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly less than we anticipated but still a respectable figure. The last statistic we assessed is its hospitalization rate. We found that this facility had 2.79 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this admittedly wasn't as strong as most of its other scores in this category, this statistic can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. When computing a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the number of hours nurses spend with residents as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is well below average. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this metric.

This facility's weakest category is short-term care, which is the final category we looked at. For this area, we gave this facility a D. Our short-term care grades are meaningful for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final item we considered in this area is the number of patients who returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home a bit in this metric as well, with just 47.1 percent of its patients returning home. This was below average.