Hammond-Whiting Care Center

Although this place's overall grade was terrible, it fared pretty well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We gave this facility just a D for our long-term care score and that actually turned out to be its second best category. Facilities that don't score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this facility vaccinated 74.37186 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly less than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. When computing our nursing grades, we factor in both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of the nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home did not fare very well here either. Due to a poor grade of F in short-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. In the category of short-term care, we try to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. With a score this poor in this area, we were not stunned to learn this place was well below average in many staffing metrics we focus on. The facility offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.