Lake Hamilton Health and Rehab

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home was given impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in that area, with a B. This turned out to be the facility's second highest score. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.08676 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This place provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Lastly, nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

The last category we assessed is short-term care, ended up being this facility's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This category is typically a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Based on its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected to find. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.