Good Samaritan Society - Home Health - Devils Lake

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that category with an A. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. This facility 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 create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A few relatively minor dings aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. There are quite a few factors within this grade. Many of these datapoints relate to nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The third category we assessed was short-term care, where this facility was awarded a B- in this category. Short-term care scores are critical for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 3.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

Moving on to the fourth category, this nursing home was given a C for long-term care, which is generally an acceptable score. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable percentage. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.