Good Samaritan Society - Idaho Falls Village

We awarded this place one of our better scores in long-term care, with an impressive grade of A+. This is a notably better grade than its overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. This nursing home's vaccination data weren't as strong as its number of nursing hours per resident. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 90.81633 percent of its patients. We would like to see some improvement in this area next year. Lastly, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 3.31 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this wasn't as favorable as some of its other scores in this category, this statistic can be skewed for some nursing homes due to some of the medical complexity of patients.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A-. The nursing grade is based on a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided 4.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This was one of the more impressive figures we found. In addition, a significant percentage of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. In addition to looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The third category we graded is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. With our short-term care grade, we try to forge a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. It fared respectably with 45.5 percent of its patients returning home.

The final category we looked at was inspections. This wasn't one of this nursing home's stronger categories. We gave it a D in this area. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we take this one very seriously. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they created a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years exceeding $50,000. This often means that government inspectors became frustrated after multiple years of bad government inspections.