Hamilton Arms Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. We weren't able to find information about this nursing home's deficiencies. We wish we had more data for this facility. Without all of the deficiency related data, it was a challenge to grade this facility in the inspections category.

This facility was awarded its next most favorable category grade in the area of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this area, which is a decent grade. Short-term care grades are important for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

This facility's least impressive area was long-term care, which is the final area we scored. It received an F for this category. Despite some acceptable grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless alarming so we wanted to point it out. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. Unfortunately, this facility vaccinated just 86.64495 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.