Hamilton Trace of Fishers

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility performed well in the area of short-term care. As a result, we gave it a score of A- for that category, which happens to be one of our higher grades. In forming these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. There are a number of factors within this area. Many of these datapoints reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below the national average. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this subcategory. This can be a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving residents more often.

The last area we scored was long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a D in this category. Sadly, this grade hurt the facility's overall profile to some degree. 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 looked at. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated a relatively low 86.86131 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.