Good Samaritan Society - Ambassador

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. We weren't able to track down deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without having the information regarding deficiencies for this facility, it was challenging to really evaluate the place in the inspections category.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its short-term care grade. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is generally a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. We analyzed the levels of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility 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 by having a policy of turning residents more frequently.

Turning to the fourth area, this facility was awarded a strong long-term care rating. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ in that area, finishing off one of our more favorable profiles. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.