Good Samaritan Society - Battle Lake

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of facilities fared better in this area. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at 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 nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.

In the final category we graded, this facility received a very strong grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. Short-term care ratings are vital for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.