Good Samaritan Society - Hays

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 95.882355 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we awarded this facility an A- for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. When calculating our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving patients at least once a day.

The next area we scored proved to be this nursing home's poorest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of C for our short-term care category. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more critical for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.