Good Samaritan Society - Decatur County

To go along with its favorable overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A- for the area of inspections. Our inspection ratings are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

We also gave this facility a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. Short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

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+. The nursing rating consists of several subcategories, but the paramount one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we graded was long-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of C. This proved to be this facility's weakest area. This is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In the category of long-term care, we look at the amount of services provided by a nursing home, rather than more healthcare-oriented services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 96.32353 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.