Minnie Hamilton Health System’s Long Term Care Unit

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really performed well in the area of long-term care, where it earned an impressive grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 96.59091 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another one of this facility's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections turned out to be one of its best category grades. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A-. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the number of hours nurses commit to residents as well as the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Turning to our last category, this nursing home was given a respectable short-term care grade of C. Our short-term care grades are probably more critical for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.