Good Samaritan Society - Arapahoe

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home earned a nearly flawless inspection report. Therefore, it earned one of our best scores in that area with an A+. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its first-rate resume, this nursing home also excelled in our long-term care area. In fact, it received a score of A in that category. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 94.94949 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Very few nursing homes fared better in this area. Our short-term care grades are arguably more meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to our next category, this facility received a very strong nursing grade. We awarded it a B+ in that category, rounding out one of our finer profiles. Our nursing score assesses a handful of factors, but the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.