Good Samaritan Society - Albion

To pair with its favorable overall grade, we awarded this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to direct your attention to the fact that this nursing home was superb in our long-term care rating. We gave them an elite score of A+ in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.333336 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Nursing ratings are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

The last category we scored is short-term care, in which this facility was awarded a B-. While this proved to be its weakest category score, this is still not a terrible score. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.