Good Samaritan Health Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. In determining our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility earned excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better grades in that area, with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. When determining our nursing grades, we analyze both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is far below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The last area we analyzed was long-term care. This facility was awarded an impressive long-term care rating in our assessment, with a B-. Although this was not nearly as impressive as many of its other category grades, this is nevertheless a decent grade for that area. For patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.723404 percent of its patients, which is better than most nursing homes. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.