Hamilton Healthcare Center

This nursing home really performed well in the category of long-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A-. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Inspections is another category where this facility excelled. In fact, we awarded this nursing home an A- for our inspections category. Our inspection scores are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's inspections. Places that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

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. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in calculating our grade in this area. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning patients even once per day.

Turning to the next category, we awarded this nursing home a D in our short-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category grade. Of course, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. Short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. We found that this facility was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the data we considered. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.