Good Samaritan Society - Decatur County

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A- for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than the facility's overall rating. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category grades was in the category of short-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. When computing a facility's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses are with residents and the level of skill of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to our fourth category, this nursing home was given a respectable long-term care score of C. In computing these long-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated only 90.07092 percent of its patients against pneumonia. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.