Good Samaritan Society - Fairfield Glade

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. Our nursing score analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Tennessee in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning a resident even once per day.

Turning to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that category, which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to our next area, this nursing home also excelled in the long-term care category. We awarded it a B+ in this category. This completed a first-rate profile. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.013245 percent of its residents, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.