Good Samaritan Society - Atwood

This nursing home received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially would like to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it an A in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an A-. Our nursing rating includes a host of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home also received a favorable long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it an above average grade of B in this category. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 84.25197 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is a few points less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we scored is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a decent grade of B-. This is this facility's worst area. In the category of short-term care, we seek to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 3.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.