Good Samaritan Society Deuel County

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. Our inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to this facility's list of strengths, it also was awarded a very favorable long-term care grade. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 98.449615 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. There are quite a few datapoints within this category. Most of these datapoints are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, while this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of our quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this metric.

The final area we graded ended up being this facility's weakest category. However, even in its weakest link we still awarded it a respectable grade of C in our short-term care category. Our short-term care scores are critical for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 3.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.