Hamilton Healthcare Center

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home was awarded strong long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our better grades in this area, with a B+. This proved to be the nursing home's second strongest score. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.72727 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.96 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the area of short-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in that area. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is considered to be a fair measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. With its abysmal grade in this category, we were not stunned to learn that this nursing home offers substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last category we rated was nursing, which ended up being this facility's worst category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this area. In computing a facility's nursing rating, we assess the number of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This place averaged just 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics hurt this facility's nursing grade significantly.