Good Samaritan Society - Alma

To go along with its favorable overall performance, we gave this facility an A for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B-. Our long-term care grade focuses on a nursing home's assistance with daily living instead of the highly skilled therapy or medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 74.01575 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit lower than average. Nevertheless, this place 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 a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our final category, this facility was given a grade of C for short-term care, which is generally a respectable score. Our short-term care scores are presumably more critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that just 3.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.