Good Samaritan Society - Comforcare

Good Samaritan Society - Comforcare is a small non-profit nursing home located in Austin, Minnesota. Sporting an overall rating of B, this facility is a fine option. This grade was right in line with the city grade in Austin. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection reports, which you can find in the next paragraph.

One of the reasons this place is a strong facility is that it received a very impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections is its best category grade. In this category, we gave this facility an A. Inspection ratings weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home was given impressive marks in the category of short-term care as well. Indeed, we awarded it one of our most dominant scores in that category with a score of A. Our short-term care ratings are presumably more critical for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. This includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. One reason for this nursing home's favorable score in this area is it provides more care from registered nurses than the typical nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home with 56.3 percent of its patients returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This facility provided 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is among the higher totals in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most skilled levels of nurses. We are very impressed by both of these statistics. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these datapoints as good indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The final category we graded was long-term care. We gave this nursing home a D in our long-term care category, making this its weakest area. For residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of offering above average levels of nursing care, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 96.74797 percent of its residents. These scores are notably more respectable than a few of its other statistics in this category. Lastly, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 2.05 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, this figure is far less impressive than its vaccination record.