Good Samaritan Society Howard

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. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for its long-term care grade. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. When determining our nursing grades, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident at least once a day.

The last area we scored was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of B. With our short-term care grade, we try to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.