Good Samaritan Society - Estherville

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in nursing, where it received an A. There are a host of datapoints included in this category. Many of these datapoints relate to nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it was given a very positive short-term care score. In fact, this ended up being its second best category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This facility earned a solid inspection report this year as well, with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that category with a score of B-. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The final area we scored was long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In computing these long-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 99.37888 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.