Hanover Nursing Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Our inspection scores are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. Unfortunately, this place received a category L deficiency, which is unexpected based on its inspection score. This category of deficiency indicates the government inspectors discovered a widespread deficiency putting patient safety or health in imminent jeopardy. Another red flag is that CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This nursing home also didn't perform too badly in the category of short-term care. In fact, we awarded it a C in that area, which turned out to be another one of its better grades. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its level of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The important question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. The final item we considered in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home ended up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our long-term care category. It was given an F in this category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is often a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 26.523296 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit below what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.

Moving on to our next area, this facility really did not perform very well in this area either. Due to a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is about as as uninspiring as it gets. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. 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 looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.