Good Samaritan Society Howard

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility was given a first-rate grade of A in our long-term care category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.373985 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We assessed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the last area, this facility also received a very strong short-term care grade, with a B+. This topped off an elite profile. With our short-term care rating, we seek to forge a fair gauge for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.