Complete Care at Hamilton: Laundry Neglect Violation - NJ
When a state surveyor visited the facility on September 8, 2025, a housekeeping staff member confirmed what residents had already been saying: their personal socks had not been paired or returned after laundering in over a month. The housekeeper said she had been very busy and hadn't found the time.
The surveyor walked to the laundry room and found five large plastic bags stuffed with residents' personal socks, sitting uncollected. The Director of Housekeeping was present and acknowledged the bags. So did the housekeeping staff member. Both said it was unacceptable.
The facility's own laundry policy states that items are done and returned within 24 to 72 hours. The socks in those bags had been waiting more than 30 times that long.
Later that morning, the surveyor sat down with the Licensed Nursing Home Administrator, the Director of Nursing, and the Vice President of Clinical Operations. The VP of Clinical Operations told the surveyor that she had already seen the five bags in the laundry room herself. She called it unacceptable.
That word, unacceptable, was used by three separate staff members across the course of the inspection. None of them had moved the socks.
The residents had not been quiet about it. The Director of Housekeeping confirmed that residents had complained to her several times before the surveyor ever arrived. The complaints had not produced action. They had produced acknowledgment, and then nothing.
There is something specific about socks that makes this violation worth pausing on. A nursing home resident's world is small. The bed, the chair, the hallway, the dining room. What you wear, what belongs to you, what you can count on being returned when it goes to the wash, these things are not minor. For many residents, personal clothing is one of the few remaining connections to a life they managed themselves. A facility policy titled Safe and Homelike Environment states that residents have the right to use their personal belongings. The socks in those five bags belonged to people who had asked for them back, repeatedly, and been ignored.
The inspection was conducted as a complaint survey, meaning someone had raised a concern before the surveyor walked through the door. The findings confirmed what that complaint described.
The violation was cited at a level of minimal harm or potential for actual harm, affecting a few residents. In the language of federal inspection reports, that is the lowest tier of severity. It means no one was hospitalized. No one developed a wound or an infection that inspectors could directly trace to going without their socks. The regulatory machinery treats this as a minor finding.
What the report captures, though, is a month of small indignity. Residents asking. Staff acknowledging. Bags filling up. A VP walking past them and finding them unacceptable, and then walking away.
The Director of Housekeeping knew. The housekeeping staff member knew. By the time the surveyor arrived, the VP of Clinical Operations knew. The inspection formalized what the facility had already internally confirmed: residents had been waiting, and no one had made returning their belongings a priority.
Complete Care at Hamilton is a licensed nursing home in Passaic, New Jersey. The inspection was completed on September 9, 2025.
Five bags of socks sat in that laundry room while the people they belonged to asked where they had gone.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Complete Care At Hamilton, LLC from 2025-09-09 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 23, 2026 · Our methodology
Complete Care at Hamilton, LLC in PASSAIC, NJ was cited for neglect violations during a health inspection on September 9, 2025.
The housekeeper said she had been very busy and hadn't found the time.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.