Good Samaritan Society - Arlington

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. We awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our short-term care grades are likely most critical for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We scrutinized the levels of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Minnesota in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident more often.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Switching gears to our final category, this facility was awarded a decent long-term care grade. Even though this is not nearly as dominant as many of its other grades, this is still not a major area of concern. In computing our long-term care scores, we analyze the facility's personal care services. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 97.10145 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.