Good Samaritan Society - Algona

On top of receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home performed well in our long-term care category. We awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.591835 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another one of this place's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best categories. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing grades are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents at least once a day.

The next category we looked at was short-term care. This facility was awarded a better than average short-term care rating this year, with a C. While this isn't quite as strong as a few of its other category grades, this is still a respectable score for this area. Our short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.