Hamilton Nursing Home

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to point out its nearly flawless government inspections 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 grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's more respectable category scores came in the area of long-term care. This proved to be its second best category. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. After considering the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated only 73.87387 percent of its residents for pneumonia. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We were surprised to find that this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. We awarded it a score of D for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our nursing score analyzes a handful of components, many of which are based on quantities of nurse staffing. This particular place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is well below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This facility fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care, where this facility was given a very poor score in this area as well. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. With our short-term care score, we try to craft a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. With a score in this range in this area, we weren't surprised to find this place was well below average in many staffing metrics we focus on. It supplied significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.1 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.