Hammond-Whiting Care Center

While we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it actually received a very impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our more favorable scores in that area with a B+. Our inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. This facility was hit with 11 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. Nursing grades are largely tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care grade. This is not a score to write home about. Our short-term care grades are important for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With its grade in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the figures we assessed. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.6 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.

The last category we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home received a very poor grade of F in this category. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated only 72.30047 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.